“Gerald,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady, “if you countermand these recommendations I’ll have to go to everybody and tell them about Bullock’s shit-list that you did nothing about.”

I made a mistake and bought plain digestives instead of chocolate ones.

The cottage now belonged to Emma's mother Beatrix, who was a tutor in English literature at a women's college, specialising in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel. This may have accounted for Emma's Christian name, for it had seemed to Beatrix unfair to call her daughter Emily, a name associated with her grandmother's servants rather than the author of The Wuthering Heights, so Emma had been chosen, perhaps with the hope that some of the qualities possessed by the heroine of the novel might be perpetuated.

In short, Jose Antonio, son of a benevolent Spanish dictator who'd been forced out by republicans, was a sentimental feudalist who suspected capitalism and believed in the dole.