The businessman is Victor Wilcox. He, short of stature, is the Managing Director of J. Pringle & Sons, an engineering firm in Brummidge and he is worried because it is experiencing some decline since the boom years. The academic is Robyn Penrose, tall and lissom, who has a three year lectureship in English Literature at Rummidge University. Her speciality is the Industrial Novel (and we are given an account of the literary theories of the time: she sides with the continental ones; she is also left-wing, a feminist and reads all sorts of Freudian symbolism into the novels.) She is told by her Head of Department (Philip Swallow, whom we have met in “Changing Places” and in “Small World”) that regrettably the financial cuts imposed by the government will not allow the university to make her post a tenured one when her three years come to an end.