journalist about the morning when her husband's "whore" came to see him at home. Reckoning that the story will be a scoop, Feathers composes a series of articles which finally appear in mid-summer, while the Blores are on a family holiday in France. Denying all allegations, Derek Blore is intent on sitting out his ordeal ("I've been in politics now for twenty-five years. And I hope I'm going to be in politics for a further twenty-five years.") and also announces that he is of course planning to sue Feathers and his newspaper. However, the prime minister is informed of the true state of affairs, knows that Blore is lying, and has him arrested while he is taking part in a rural pageant in his capacity as a church warden. Quote On marriage: Marriage was for the common-sensical, it was for those who took short views, or no views at all; it was for those for whom life was largely a matter of meals and clothes, orgasm and real estate. For anyone who nurtured Emotion as the centre of existence, and who felt the permanent pull of an unseen, spiritual or cerebral world, the quotidian triviality of married intimacy was bound to be intolerable. So, in practice, it invariably was. Not only were the married lives of most poets and musicians intolerable. So too were the lives of religious mystics if they made the mistake of getting married. As often as not, this category of person sensibly opted for a celibate existence. (Chapter Five) Adaptation It was adapted for BBC tv in 1989, with the title Blore, MP, as part of the Screen One strand. Further reading A. N. Wilson's My Name Is Legion (2004) deals in a similar way with politics, political corruption and yellow journalism. Josephine Hart's 1991 novel Damage is a much more sombre treatment of a politician's fall from power. In a similar vein, Nicholas Mosley's Natalie Natalia centres around an adulterous British MP disillusioned with his job. Harley Granville Barker's 1906 play Waste, banned at the time, is about a politician who makes a married woman pregnant and then refuses to help her procure an abortion. Democracy, an 1880 novel by Henry Adams, discusses political scandals in the United States of the second half of the 19th century, with Ratcliffe being only slightly more unrefined and uneducated than Blore. Carl Hiaasen's novel Sick Puppy (1999) takes