[In The Middle Ground, Kate, a journalist] is sick to death of women but women are all that she really knows about.

After this beginning, there follow some 60 pages in which Kate's previous history … is summarised in detail. The writing itself is swift and sure; but one wonders if, technically, it would not have been more effective to have cut back and forth between present and past, rather than to have served up to the reader this solid chunk of the past to digest, before feeding him even a scrap of the present.

Kate's friends belong to the professional classes…. They are comfortably off … but they are also concerned about the impoverished and the underprivileged.

Margaret Drabble defines these people—and also an Arab guest of Kate's—with all her usual perception and sympathy. She also skilfully suggests their awareness of how precarious is the metaphorical palisade that...