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Warrender, the literary editor who gave him his staple work as a reviewer, to come and have dinner. He had also invited a married couple he had known since Oxford and a woman novelist of his own age, who made her living by broadcasting in a vein both maternal and minatory that was favoured by the radio, where she described Moby-Dick as 'boysy' and Anna Karenina as 'badly written'. Patrick was gay, so there had been no need to find more women, and the conversation had continued successfully till one o'clock.
    Tranter had written two reviews in the armful of Sunday papers he brought back from the newsagent. One of them had suffered the usual trimming, with some of his better thrusts cut back or modified; the other was untouched - usually a sign that Patrick Warrender, late back from lunch at his gentlemen's club, had miscalculated the space and so had been obliged to let Tranter run on to his full extent. In any event, both were satisfactory. Tranter felt he had not only explained why the books were flawed, but had also managed to demonstrate that both writers were, in some essential way, fraudulent.
    He went through to the small kitchen that overlooked the backyards of the terrace. A woman in Muslim headgear (what was the word for it? Hijab? Burkha?) was hanging washing on a line. Were they allowed to do that? he wondered. At some level, Tranter was confused between Muslim women in traditional dress and nuns. Was either group, for instance, allowed to ride a bicycle or play ping-pong? Would that be blasphemous, or merely comic?
    In the next garden, the Bosnian war criminal was stripping down his motorbike, while from beyond him came the shrieking voices of the fast-breeding Catholic Polish family, as four boys attempted a football game on the tiny lawn.
    Tranter took a mug of tea back to the sitting room and opened the third newspaper on his pile. He threw the sport and City sections into the recycling basket and turned to the book review pages. A history of the ballpoint pen was well received by a young novelist, who described Biro's invention as 'iconic', and made reference to Roland Barthes and Eric Cantona. A life of Dora Carrington was given a guarded welcome by a biographer of Roger Fry. 'Not vintage, but quaffable' was the verdict of the paper's diarist on a guide to New World wines, while the MP for a market town in Derbyshire dismissed the memoirs of an American Secretary of State as 'Pooterish'.
    None of this stuff interested Tranter. His years in the business had trained him to go straight to the fiction pages, which he read with the eye of a fund manager scanning market prices. The difference was that Tranter had no investment and no favourite; he didn't want to see a modest growth, still less a boom. He was interested only in bad reviews. Crash was what he wanted: crash and burn - failure, slump, embarrassment. He liked it when acerbic youngsters teased established writers and he relished it when old pipe-suckers slapped down a lively newcomer. His own speciality was the fa cetious, come-off-it review which invited the reader to share his opinion that the writer's career had been a sustained con trick at the expense of the gullible book-buyer. He dismissed equally the offerings of famous old men, heavy with honours, and those of photogenic young women. While he averted his eyes from other people's praise, he was generous in his enjoyment of like-minded reviews. Sometimes, he sent postcards in his precise ballpoint handwriting: 'I thought you got the new ---- exactly right. RT.'
    Literary setbacks came in many shapes, and Tranter relished all of them: he was a connoisseur of disappointment, a voluptuary of disgrace. Alone among European reviewers, a young RT had found the agreed masterpiece of a Latin American novelist to be a 'disappointment ... tricked out with the sad old tropes of magic realism ... meretricious'. Of all the ways of failing as a novelist the one that Tranter relished most was the mid-career