The main character, ten-year-old Hubert Anvil, is a chorister at St George's Basilica, Coverley (real world Cowley), for whom tragedy beckons when his teachers and the Church hierarchy, all the way up to the Pope himself, decree that the boy's superb voice is too precious to sacrifice to puberty.

When Henry of York ("the Abominable") tried to usurp his nephew's throne, there was a papal crusade (the "War of the English Succession") to restore the rightful heir, culminating in the "Holy Victory" at Coverley, which was designated as the ecclesiastical capital of England.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling held office as "First Citizen" from 1914 to 1918, while Edgar Allan Poe was an acclaimed general who died at the moment of his victory over the combined forces of Louisiana and Mexico in the war of 1848–1850.

The state of the world is illustrated in a description of national, clerical and royal figures at the funeral of Stephen III, late King of England, which opens the book.

The "Vicar General" of the "Emperor Patriarch" of Candia suggests that the Greek Orthodox Church survives as a separate ecclesiastical jurisdiction, albeit exiled from its native Greece (which is still under Ottoman domination) and with its headquarters in Crete.

Described as a war against an opponent that can never be destroyed and which can be held in check only by maintaining permanent armies and fleets, it serves the useful purpose of distracting any tendency to rebel or question.

However, one of Hubert's childhood friends, Decuman, is mentioned as being among the occupation troops in Adrianople in far western Turkey, suggesting that the Ottomans either lost the war, or at least were forced to make significant territorial concessions to the Catholic West.

There is also reference to a Monsignor Jean-Paul Sartre of the Jesuits, and A. J. Ayer (who was in real life a noted atheist) is Professor of Dogmatic Theology at New College, Oxford.

Some of the incidental pleasure of the book is in the "alternative technology" reminiscent of Amis's friend and fellow-author Harry Harrison, such as the high-speed train that takes characters from London to Rome in just seven hours, via Thomas Sopwith's Channel Bridge.

Other references are more obscure; opera-lovers with a good knowledge of Latin will, however, be able to identify the two castrati from the Vatican, Federicus Mirabilis and Lupigradus Viaventosa, as the German singers Fritz Wunderlich and Wolfgang Windgassen, both recently deceased when Amis was writing.

The same book also features the publication of The Origin of Species, the widespread application of electricity including in aviation and Beethoven's composing of twenty symphonies before his death in 1835.