There are many characters in this book, which wouldn’t matter if they were sufficiently well differentiated to remember – but they’re not, and this is particularly true of the women. The book’s title derives from one of those academic weekends we used to hear about where the main purpose seemed to be casual sex rather than the pursuit of learning. And all the lecturers are men - why is that, William?The book has a thesis to the effect that although we are human we can’t escape from our animal natures. This is illustrated by the sexual antics of most of those concerned, and also by boring lecture extracts about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Sophocles’ Oedipus.Very often, when a new section of the book begins, the reader (this reader and his wife, anyway) have great difficulty figuring out who ‘she’ is, or ‘he’ is. It reads like an intellectual exercise, borrowing some women of the type to be found in his newspaper series called The Jury Room and relocating them to the lower reaches of academia.Some of the newspaper pieces were excellent but this book is not. Well worth avoiding.
