David Henry Benedictus was born in London at the height of the Munich crisis, the son of Henry Jules and Kathleen Constance Ricardo Benedictus. He was educated at Britain's most socially exclusive school, Eton, and then at Oxford's most intellectually exclusive college, Balliol, where in 1959 he obtained a second class degree in English Language and Literature. He also spent a short time at the University of Iowa, but it is Eton which is satirized in The Fourth of June (1962). The timing of Benedictus's first novel was admirable, as it coincided with a wave of satire directed against the Macmillan government, full of old Etonians and racked by sexual scandals.In the next fifteen years Benedictus produced seven more novels, some plays, and a book on antiques--as well as working for television, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and running his own antique stall. This hectic existence perhaps explains why...