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“... flame) has been observed as frequently as legend suggests, and it is not clear whether or not Peter Mayle himself witnessed the burning of the ten-pound note that had masqueraded as a tip (although he claims that the perpetrator of the deed is a friend). But why then does this legend persist? Presumably because, for some, the idea of wealth, power ...”

“... of refuge and fantasy’. It is one of those destinations – ‘like the South of France before Peter Mayle, and Tuscany before champagne socialists’ – which, it is assumed, is ‘unspoilt by the American coffee shops and the malls and the ring roads that have ruined Arnoldian England’. But as Sansom discovers, the Ireland of middle-class English ...”

“... vineyards, light’, Bedford’s Provence is an expat fantasy every bit as heedless as that of Peter Mayle, but her cosmopolitan sophistication, the pressures of her entre-deux-guerres historical moment and the terrible events of which she sometimes wrote, help to tease the fantasy apart: the ‘illusion of freedom’, as she sometimes called it ...”