The Rock Pool

This, Connolly attributes to his classical education, when he discovered by the use of cribs that the dry Latin he read was the "ironical, sensual and irreligious opinions of a middle-aged Roman, one whose chief counsel to youth was to drink and make love to the best of its ability".

Richards had abandoned a career as a stockbroker to become a tea planter in Burma – where his first wife had been killed by a crocodile, after falling from a boat.

In 1938, Connolly published Enemies of Promise, a critical work, in which he attempted to explain his failure to produce the literary masterpiece which he and others believed he should have been capable of writing.

Naylor, an apprentice stock-broker with literary aspirations, drifts into Trou, which he imagines as an archeological relic of the nineteen-twenties riviera life-style.

Fascinated by their histories he decides to linger on in the town, but, in a clash between his staid English upbringing and the dissolute dog-eat-dog life-style, he is embroiled in squabbles and fights and progressively demoralised by his acquaintances.

In due course, the main characters leave town, and Naylor, left behind sinking into a haze of Pernod, finds himself described by passing tourists as "Just another bum".