Perhaps he had been imbibing a bit more than he should lately. His vanity had for many years provided a useful counterbalance to his appetites, but it might be that the flesh was gaining ground. “You know how I feel about the earnest politically correct,” he said as he lifted his spoon to his lips again. “They give me the pip. And there’s nothing I abhor more than the feminist biographer. They take some trivial piece of work and inflate it with Freudian psychobabble and grandiose feminist theory until you wouldn’t recognize it if it bit you.”

Margery’s left eyebrow arched itself more pronouncedly, and Darcy knew that this time he had indeed gone too far. “Surely you’re not suggesting that Lydia’s work was trivial?” she asked. “And you make Victoria McClellan sound like some sort of unwashed bluestocking. She struck me as being quite sensible and well grounded, certainly not the sort I’d expect to lose track of the work in the process of theorizing about it.”

Darcy snorted. “Oh, no. Dr. McClellan is anything but unwashed. Quite the opposite-she could model for an American shampoo advert on the telly, she’s so well washed and groomed. She’s an example of the perfect nineties woman-brilliant academic career, model mother and wife-only, she wasn’t good enough at the wife part to keep her husband from shagging a succession of graduate students.” The image made him smile. Ian McClellan’s only failure had been his lack of discretion.

“Darcy!” Margery pushed away her empty soup bowl. “That was unkind as well as common.”

“Oh, Mother, really. What it is is common knowledge. Everyone in the English Faculty knows all the libidinous details. They just take care to whisper them when the fair Victoria is out of earshot. And I don’t see what is so unkind about the bald truth.”

Margery pressed her lips together, darting a still disapproving glance at him as she uncovered the main course and began serving their plates. Point to me, thought Darcy with satisfaction. Margery was no prude, as the increasingly graphic sexuality of her later novels revealed, and Darcy thought she merely enjoyed playing the shocked matron.