Simon Raven was a highly productive writer who made a significant and distinctive contribution to postwar English fiction, especially in the ten novels of his "Alms for Oblivion" sequence, published between 1964 and 1976. The world that Raven explores in his work is the intricate, influential world of the British upper middle classes in the convulsive period from 1945 to the 1970s: his main characters emerge from and move between the key institutions of that world--the public school, Cambridge, the army, the Houses of Parliament, the intellectual journal, the publishing house that aims to combine culture with commerce. His characters also rub shoulders with and sometimes enter into other, less public zones, however: of prostitution of a kind that caters to idiosyncratic sexual tastes; of homosexuality in a society in which, until 1967, same-sex relationships between those defined as consenting adults were illegal; of Cold War espionage; of popular journalism. Raven portrays...