With writers, as with footballers, there comes a time in the career when age starts to be mentioned regularly, either as an explanation for decline or as a cause for a pat on the back for those who ‘defy’ it. The latter smacks of faint praise, of course – ‘good for his age’ – but I think I can justify mentioning that Francis King is eighty-six, because to some degree it serves as an explanation: in part, the novel succeeds precisely because of the author’s age.

The 1940s are a popular setting for novelists, but evoking a historical period is a difficult, and often mismanaged, task. So many historical novels are full of anachronisms, or don’t give enough sense of the era,