 He has also been called "cynical" and "cold-blooded", his characters "guaranteed to behave badly under pressure; most of them are vile without any pressure at all".His unashamed credo was "a robust eighteenth-century paganism...allied to a deep contempt for the egalitarian code of post-war England".The 10 novels cover the period 1945 to 1973 and centre on a group of upper and upper middle class characters, forming a novel sequence, if a somewhat loosely structured one.