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Berridge is a generous-spirited radical, inhabiting every perspective with insight and commitment. Her aristocrats have virtues which she values and which redeem them personally, but do not justify their overprivileged status.

The critical even-handedness Berridge so masterfully deploys is, I feel, particularly effective in 'Snowstorm' which explores the fraught emotional territories of motherhood and medicine to reveal the debasing potential of certain ethics of care and self-sacrifice. In the delicately nuanced comparison of a worldly young pregnant woman and a female gynaecologist in charge of a maternity hospital under the chronic additional tension of evacuation, Berridge allows the latter bitter envy, and a measure of consolation.