Andrew Sinclair's early novels were greeted with enthusiasm by readers and reviewers alike. His first two novels, published when he was in his mid-twenties, met with instant success with the reading public. The critics praised his narrative style and his facility for gentle social satire and predicted that he would take his place among the best-known novelists of his generation. Although Sinclair has retained his popularity with the general reading public, many critics have felt that his later novels fail to fulfill the promise they saw in his earlier work. Since the publication of his first novel, The Breaking of Bumbo (1959), Sinclair's career has developed in many different directions: he has been a university lecturer, a journalist, a translator, and a director of feature films; as well as writing novels, he is the author of biographies and books on social history. His interests as historian and biographer frequently...