On the morning after he has celebrated his 60th birthday party at a celebrity-filled party, Ned Marriott is in bed with his partner, Emma, when there's a knock on the door. Detectives from the London police force's 'Operation Millpond' have come to arrest him over an allegation of sexual assault. Ned is one of the country's best-known historians - teaching at a leading university, advising governments and making top-rating TV documentaries - but this 'historic' claim from someone the cops insist on calling 'the victim' threatens him with personal and professional ruin and potential imprisonment. Professor Marriott would normally turn for support to Tom Pimm, his closest friend at the university, but Tom has just been informed that a secret investigation has raised anonymous complaints, which may end Dr Pimm's career. Swinging between fear, bewilderment and anger, Ned and Tom must try to defend themselves against the allegations, and hope that no others are made. The two men's families and friends are forced to question what they know and think. Can the complainants, detectives, HR teams, journalists and Tweeters who are driving the stories all be seeing smoke that has no fire behind it? By turns shocking and comic, reportorial and thoughtful, The Allegations startlingly and heart-breakingly captures a contemporary culture in which allegations are easily made and reputations casually destroyed. Asking readers to decide who they believe, it explores a modern nightmare that could happen, in some way, to anyone whose view of personal history may differ from someone else's.

The Allegations

Beginning in Timaru, reputedly the most activity-challenged place in New Zealand, Lawson travels through Australia and Canada, where he learns to be especially wary of any place named after Queen Victoria or her close relatives. After dropping in on Normal, Illinois and Dead Horse, Alaska - place names in the quiet world are sometimes disarmingly honest - he travels through soothing Switzerland, Milton Keynes, and Belgium, before his journey's end in EuroDisney, Expo '92, and Center Parcs: territories of Somewhere, the new tourist continent where, in a reversal of the usual rules of travel, countries come to you.

The Battle for Room Service - Journeys to All the Safe Places

Enough is Enough revolves around actual events in May 1968. Harold Wilson knows the public thinks he's a slippery liar, the newspapers are out for his blood, and the party which once loved him is now plotting to remove him. Still, he has failed to spot at least two other conspiracies brewing. Bernard Storey, a journalist, stumbles on the rival plots and enters a world of lying and spying, back-stabbing and blackmail, malicious gossip and false intelligence.

Enough Is Enough - or, The Emergency Government

Four families live in a beautiful stretch of English countryside in magnificent listed houses, built for the old aristocracy. They are the new aristocracy and the elite of their village: financiers, business tycoons, lawyers, doctors, magistrates. They leave their rural idyll only to commute first-class to London for meetings, deals and theatre outings or Heathrow flights to winter sun or half-term skiing. They and their children are protected by investments, pensions and expensive security systems. But the money is running out in Britain, and as tensions and relationships develop within the group of friends, finally, deep in the English winter, an unthinkable act of violence destroys these dream lives and demonstrates that the biggest threat may come from unexpected places. This horrific act happens on the first pages but Lawson provides dramatic twists and false turns and it is only by the end of the book that we discover who the victims are and who committed the crime. Mark Lawson's first novel in eight years is his most ambitious yet. Combining ingenious plotting with forensic social comedy, this is a dark and brilliant novel of life in twenty-first-century England.

The Deaths

J'ai une confession à faire. Hier, j'étais responsable de la mort de millions de Britanniques. Ce qui s'est passé, c'est que le MI5 m'a demandé de traîner Mehan Asnik, un terroriste présumé, dans les rues de Londres. Il s'était échappé de nos services de sécurité alors qu'il était infecté par un virus de la peste. Le suivant sur CCTV, je jure que je l'ai eu mais ensuite, dans l'agitation, je l'ai perdu. Lorsque le mobile sécurisé a sonné, c'était Harry Pearce à Thames House, me mâchant pour l'abattage qui avait été causé par mon erreur.

L'une des choses qui sépare la culture britannique et américaine est la révérence du drapeau de la culture américaine.

Les critiques donnent des marques pour l'originalité, le théâtre, la photographie et les scripts, tandis que le public de masse est plus attiré par la familiarité du genre, les étoiles avec lesquelles ils aimeraient avoir des relations sexuelles ou des parcelles qui sont plus susceptibles de faire en sorte que leurs dates aient des relations sexuelles avec eux. Les critiques font leur travail de la journée, les cinéphiles s'échappent du leur: cela conduit à une différence de réponse inévitable. Il est cependant faux de conclure que les examinateurs sont complètement inutiles. Les livres, les films et les émissions peuvent être à l'épreuve des critiques, mais les ego et les psychites des personnes qui les font très rarement le sont.

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