he Hampstead adultery novel is an extinct species that is constantly turning out, like the coelacanth, not to be extinct at all. I mean, of course, the sort of novel that tells you about middle-class London media professionals sleeping with people who aren’t their spouses – Iris Murdoch wrote several of the best (see, among others, 1961’s A Severed Head). There’s probably no getting away from it, at least until climate change renders cities uninhabitable and media careers unlikely. After all, novelists are often middle class media professionals who live in London, and sometimes they sleep with
