Description:A satire on life and culture in a Welsh seaside town, the story concerns
a married librarian who begins an affair with the bored wife of a local
bigwig. Amis, an English incomer to Swansea in real life, mocks Wales's
devotion to culture and learning as false and pretentious.
In The Old Devils, one of the central characters, the writer Alun
Weaver, is portrayed as a "stage-Taffy"; Weaver is the memoirist of a
fictional Welsh poet based loosely on Dylan Thomas.