The office is the place where many of us spend the best part of our lives, and we view it with an all too familiar mixture of fear and relish. we resent its tedium and dread its dramas, yet when absent we pine for the gossip and companionship and even (at times) the work. Like the underside of a stone, even the dimmest office swarms with unexpected life, displaying a gamut of emotions from ruthless ambition and sycophantic cowardice to loyalty and love. Jeremy Lewis is concerned, above all, with the way in which Dickens's Wemmick or PG Wodehouses's Psmith or Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt embody the feelings common to us all; in this highly entertaining anthology he takes us from the first interview to the sad oblivion of retirement, by way of the boss, the sack and the Bacchanalian office party.