A natural successor to The Consul's File, this book takes the American narrator from Ayer Hitam to a new post in the London Embassy. As he once observed with a cool, amused eye the British and Malays, he can now observe the British and their endless treasure trove of eccentricities on home ground. And the Americans in the embassy are no less curious. There is the embassy Minister who is obsessed with rage at a male employee who wears an earring, an Arab who has come to London to rob a certain tomb, a woman who cycles all the way to Yorkshire to exact a peculiar revenge, and dozens of others who nurse some secret vagary - and, with each, Theroux produces a surprising illumination.