Published by Heinemann in 1979 at £5.95. The US edition by Morrow was published in 1980 at $9.95.
Richard Seyton, millionaire diamond dealer, has returned to Britain on the death of his elder brother. Seyton now inherits their ancestral home, Seyton Hall, but finds it has been let on a twenty-year lease to a charitable foundation. He tries to persuade them to sell the lease back to him, but is voted down by the board. The only way to break the lease is to discover some scandal about the charity. This he does, but in doing so awakens the remorseless Birdcage machine, which has no compunction about burying awkward truths and truth tellers.
A feature of the book is the quotation-swapping game that pervades all the conversations of the Birdcage senior staff, namely Grandison, Warboys and Quint, going over the head of the junior operative Kerslake. Some readers will find this exasperating. Canning obviously had a lot of fun with it. The authors cited include Matthew Arnold, Max Beerbohm, Chesterton, Herrick, Homer, Juvenal, Masefield, Shakespeare, Spenser and Wordsworth, but none of them are identified in the text. In a neat plot twist, it is the belated recognition of the source one of the last quotations that alerts Warboys to Grandison's malevolent intentions, turning a frivolous game into a crisis.
 First edition |
 US first edition |
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