Lieutenant James Churchill had been reasonably pro-death before he made love to Katherine, and before he realized what the appalling nature of Operation Apollo was. Officially, he and his fellow officers had a seventy-five per cent chance of survival. Unofficially, he’d been told, there was none. Then someone started the Anti-Death League and there suddenly seemed a way out of the horrors to come.

          Kingsley Amis’s story of sinister military plans, double agents and triple bluffs is set against a background of indolent officers’ fun and games, with women, with each other and with a hidden new weapon which was just a red herring to keep everyone guessing about the real nature of their secret schemes.