Just over halfway through this delightfully subtle autobiography we find our hero in Finland. The previous volume ended with David Lodge’s first major artistic breakthrough, his fifth novel, Changing Places, and the author preoccupied by his anxieties about whether to give up both the day job and his Catholic faith. Huge success lay behind him. As a “hotshot professor” (a term used ironically although he certainly was precisely that), regular international speaking invitations had come his way, and had provided a subject for his fiction.