Ian Critchley
The SPAD’s Tale
Dickie Pentecost, diplomatic correspondent at a failing newspaper, is enjoying a spot of ‘champing’ (camping in a church) with his wife and two teenage daughters when he meets Ethel (short for Ethelbert), a spiky-haired young man who soon charms them all. Ethel runs Making Nice, a PR company specialising in data, and when Dickie loses his job on the paper, he accepts a role with the company. In short order he is sent to Africa and then America to work on presidential campaigns, before being hired as a ghostwriter and special adviser to a government minister. Things are looking up for Dickie, but is Ethel all he seems?
Alarm bells should ring for Dickie when Ethel appears to know everything about the Pentecost family’s background, yet Dickie drifts along on the tide of events, either unwilling to assert himself or incapable of influencing what happens, even when Ethel begins an entirely inappropriate relationship with Dickie’s sixteen-year-old
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf
'The authorities are able to detain individuals in solitary confinement for up to six months at a secret location', which 'increases the risk to the prisoner of torture'.
@lucyjpop looks at two cases of China's brutal crackdown on free expression.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/xu-zhiyong-thupten-lodoe
'"The Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back