It is the sixties in the century of middlemen. Meet the cast: Rusty Conway, Chief Public Relations Officer of U.V.I, a company whose dress fabrics, manufactured from sand and saltpetre, have an unfortunate tendency to explode; Serena Scott-Buttery, Rusty’s beleaguered psychoanalyst, desperate to slink up the property ladder and fend off menacing contractors, mortgagors, and TV producers; Serena’s sister Stella, a flamboyant Euro-hopping leech whose affectations test Serena’s patience; Sales Promotion manager Harry Thorpe, with his carefully preserved Yorkshire accent; and Hughie Hill, producer of Focus on Facts. The last of Brooke-Rose’s realist novels, published in 1961, The Middlemen is a scathing social critique and hilarious satire, as well as a telling portent as to how the emerging decades would develop. Introduction by Francis Booth.