Beryl Bainbridge began her working life as an actress and has remained an entertainer ever since, as one of Britain's most popular and best-loved novelists. Her work has attracted a wide readership as well as critical acclaim, having been short-listed for the Booker Prize four times, and winning the Whitbread Prize three times, most recently for Every Man for Himself (1996). Her trademark is the sardonic, even at times macabre wit in her books, usually mercilessly black comedies with eccentric characters. But, by the author's skill, we never lose sympathy with these inhabitants of a peculiarly 'dismal England'. This is partly because of her fine ear for the nuances of dialogue, though what is left unsaid is often as important as what is. Bainbridge is a wonderful observer of human folly and self-deception. The shabbiness of human behaviour, especially in domestic warfare between the sexes, is a constant theme. At its most extreme, she explored the motives of a man and wife pushed to breaking point in Watson's Apology (1984), her re-imagining of a notorious Victorian murder case. Usually her long-suffering women characters/narrators content themselves with being sceptical of male pretensions. But Bainbridge can be unusually sympathetic to men. The Birthday Boys (1991), for instance, shows us the fallible sides of Captain Scott and his companions in their doomed struggle to and from the South Pole, in their fears and foibles, their camaraderie and heroic foolishness. The unpredictable nature of reality is the underlying theme of her first novels, as in A Weekend with Claud (1967) and Another Part of the Wood (1968), which end with sudden death in bizarre circumstances. The latter takes place during a rainy camping weekend in Wales with a mixed group of adults and children wrangling at each other, exploring the woods, and trying to keep amused or at least warm. Joseph's joy with his young son Roland is balanced by arguments with his girlfriend Dotty ('always anxious to put her in the wrong') and the other misfits. All are self-absorbed, somewhat out of step with ordinary life, and have relationships that are deeply disappointing. Interspersed amongst all this are fine comic moments, as when Balfour, 'bloated with excitement', overhears May's husband telling her the erotic story of 'Lallah Rooke' at night. The tragic finale is brought about by Roland swallowing another child's medication. In a typical Bainbridge touch, the news comes as the adults are at last burying their resentments and enjoying themselves with a game of 'Monopoly', his father 'full of fun' holding the paper money in his fist'. A number of her novels are set in Bainbridge's native Liverpool, from the wartime scenes of The Dressmaker (1973) to Young Adolf (1978) which imagines a visit supposedly made to the city in his youth by the future dictator. But she draws perhaps most successfully on local knowledge, and her own early life working for a repertory company there, in An Awfully Big Adventure (1989), which was fairly recently made into a film starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. The city's hotels, shops and landmarks are seen in cold grainy images of post-war austerity in Britain. A seasonal production of 'Peter Pan' is the stage set for an ensemble piece of the human comedy, whose sad and passionate characters are, as ever, somewhat at emotional cross-purposes. A sixteen year old Stella is the ingenue who in the course of the production gains (mostly sexual) experience but not necessarily self-knowledge. In her naïve infatuation with theatre manager Meredith, a discreet homosexual, she attempts to make him jealous by sleeping with an ageing famous actor, for whom the affair has drastic consequences. As the plot unwinds, Stella's actions unwittingly reveal adultery, homosexuality (then illegal), and the buried secrets of her own parentage. It ends on an absurd note: death in the River Mersey, and Stella blithely phoning 'The Speaking Clock' to hear her actre