['The Worlds' seems to be based on Shakespeare's 'Timon of Athens.'] Mr Bond's Timon figure is an industrialist named Trench who is kidnapped by terrorists and who discovers when released that his subordinates have taken advantage of his absence to vote him out of office. Like Timon he invites them to a farewell party in order to insult them, and then disappears from society…. In exile he re-encounters his former captors who now have a new prisoner and, in a bored disinterested way, offers them sanctuary. As he says, unlike his supposed friends, 'those people told the truth: they said they were my enemies.'

Like Shakespeare, Mr Bond runs into trouble finding things for his solitary misanthrope to do and fitting him with a credible opposition, but he does tell a better story than Shakespeare. The play has the customary Bondian virtues of speed, clarity and...