Christopher Silvester and I both practise the trade of pseudonymous assassination, he most notably as Grovel in Private Eye, and I as ... well, mind your own business. It’s pseudonymous.

I hope I haven’t been hired to do a hatchet job on this book, because it can’t be done. I thought it would be a sitting duck. Silvester is a voracious quidnunc and amateur crooner with one of those after-dinner voices that could smoke fish. He has a taste for