Then Melbourne suddenly died. By 1890, crooked land speculators and corrupt governments had squandered everything and it fell upon hard times, suffering a depression when the rest of the world was booming. It withdrew into itself, resisted all change and all interesting activity, and soon everyone forgot it was there. It was as if, having been to the top and experienced so great a fall from those dizzy heights, it was determined never to be significant again. It drifted, provincial, parochial, a listless colonial child, bored, boring and diffident. The population ignored the world and everything in it, even as it was ignored. Had it not been for the football, horse races and the remarkably changeable weather, they wouldn’t have bothered to speak at all.

​

Immediately, he slipped out of the robe and pressed against her. Eyes closed, sighing audibly, she parted her peignoir, and showed him herself. He placed his cheek against her breast, and she kissed his hair, and pulled him into her, and thus, in the familiar all-new way, they were joined…
It wasn’t familiar for me! But this scene continues thus—the telephone rings and, in just the way that no one ever should when lovemaking, the mistress answers it…
Gisele lay petrified, gazing with bewilderment at Claude’s face above her. The telephone was waiting. She tried to find her voice again. “But—there is no one here—”
“Put him on. This is important!” It was a command.
  Gisele was dumbfounded, helpless. Her poise was gone. She covered the mouthpiece fully, and looked imploringly at Claude. “Your wife—she knows—”
  The length of their exchange had given them away, and Claude knew it. Miserably, he disengaged his body from Gisele’s, took the prosecuting telephone, and sat up, cross-legged on the bed.
“Denise. Listen to me...”
“You listen, you rotten pig—you pull your trousers on and come home. The press is on its way—we’ve just won the Nobel Prize!”
   A book full of dirty bits as Irving Wallace tells of how a disparate group of worthies collect their newly won Nobel Prizes, and their adventures in Sweden, as well as an awful lot of anecdotal stuff about the scandals and achievements of past winners of The Prize. A sensation at the time it was written but all rather feeble and drab by today’s standards.
  It was made into a movie, or at least the minor thriller sub-plot was, that featured Paul Newman and the luscious Elke Sommer, which might have been an okay Hitchcockian piece had it no been for the ludicrous and foolishly naive nudist colony scene in the middle. It really made a joke of its otherwise sophistication.