Nicholas Shakespeare was born in 1957. The son of a diplomat, much of his youth was spent in Asia and South America. One of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 1993, and considered by the Wall Street Journal as 'one of the best English novelists of our time', his prize-winning books have been translated into twenty-two languages. They include The Vision of Elena Silves (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Snowleg, The Dancer Upstairs, Inheritance, Priscilla, Six Minutes in May and acclaimed biographies of Bruce Chatwin and Ian Fleming. His most recent thriller featuring John Dyer was The Sandpit. He has been longlisted for the Booker Prize twice, was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

A joy to read, the novel reflects John le Carré's genre-stretching influence on every page: the boys' school setting, the mixture of social comedy and Hitchcockian shenanigans, the astute, sophisticated prose, the central philosophical dilemma, and the exploration of what it means to be English in a globalised world.