[It's] from Harriet said …, the first to be written, back in the Fifties, and eventually published … in 1972, that the Bainbridge oeuvre as we know it today begins.

Six almost slim volumes … of a surprising uniformity…. In the Seventies Miss Bainbridge seems to be repeating what Mrs Spark was doing in the Sixties, giving us one brief, beautifully turned book after the other.

This year the product is entitled Injury Time, which immediately demonstrated the authoress's feeling for the mood of the day, her perfect ear for its idiom: a term derived from the twentieth century's chosen religion, football, here very effectively and outrageously applied to the middle age of human beings of the western urbanised, upper-lower-middle-class, bruised-but-still-battling-on variety, whom Miss Bainbridge has made it her speciality to portray….

Perhaps Binny and her Edward epitomise Western society itself, but however that may be, here Miss Bainbridge, again sensing exactly...