The Kirks are trendy leftist people but living together for many years and the advance of middle age have left unfavourable traces in their relationship.

They smoke pot at parties, Barbara develops a new interest in health food and astrology, Howard grows a beard and they both start having "small affairs".

When Barbara gets pregnant, rather than cancelling his class, Howard takes his students to the clinic to watch his wife giving birth.

Finally, in 1967, he is appointed lecturer at Watermouth and right from the start he is intent on radicalising that bourgeois town, especially the new university, an institution that he describes as 'a place I can work against'.

Whereas Howard selects his many sexual partners from among the people who work at the university (students as well as faculty members) on Saturday mornings, Barbara Kirk regularly goes on "shopping trips" to London to visit the same young man.

At one point in the novel, Howard's promiscuity gets him into trouble when he is told that he might be sacked for "gross moral turpitude" (which he defines to a female student of his as "raping large numbers of nuns") but he shrugs off this accusation as being based on "a very vague concept, especially these days".

Flora Beniform is a social psychologist with rather unconventional research methods: she sleeps with men in whom she is professionally interested to elicit information.