“Sorry. Excuse me. Am I very late?” Henrietta shrugged. They had travelled the world together on commissions for the Morning Graphic. They had been in many scrapes but the irritation she felt with him never went away. She admonished him. “Don't tell me. You've brought that damn Morgan Aero8 sports car with you, haven't you? You've been trying to park it, keeping me waiting.”

It is a tale of birth, death, love, hate, mating—(treated unafraidly by both the author of the book and last night’s lecturer in his polished review)—of overbearing lords, of days of early American slavery, of economic conditions of early and later America, of the simpering dames of Napoleon’s period, and the passionate women of the luxurious and seductive age of the Roman Empire.

Kausalya, she learnt, was his dai, the one who had breast-fed and looked after him.

Ella snagged a bottle of water from the fridge before leaving for her jog.