Well, that was fun. A relief to have something so frivolous about a woman’s life to turn to! It’s Cinderella all over again, combined with a puncturing – or, more accurately, a ripping to shreds – of conventional moral values. Miss Pettigrew is forty, downtrodden, friendless and on the verge of destitution when she encounters Delysia LaFosse. Even better, it doesn’t all end on the stroke of midnight.

Complete froth, but enjoyable, readable froth – with the authentic 1930s mindset about the superiority of the true Englishman (ironically, built like the Greek Hercules and with the face of the American Clark Gable) over the handsome, friendly, charming not-quite-a-gentleman Phil, disqualified from marrying the delicious Delysia-who-can’t-say-no because “somewhere in his ancestry there has been a Jew”. Ouch. Narrow conventions can be swept aside in the matter of morals . . . but not ancestry.