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Spike’s second transformative encounter is with the glamorous, wounded student Joaquin. When the stubbly Chilean radical leans in to kiss him, he is first shocked, then smitten, inducted into the erotic life and the political. Several lines of lyrical description later, he can say honestly (and a little comically) to himself: “I had never, it now seemed, been kissed…

From now on I resolved to devote my life to the liberation of the urban proletariat.”

A long second section has Spike, now a postgraduate student, accompany Ogden, now working for a Bennite Labour MP, on a trip to East Germany in (though neither knows it) its dying days. Hensher, an old hand at this territory, writes about the GDR with a wistfulness modified by his customary irony. Ogden reveals a dark side, a repressed and violent sexuality, and hints that his politics are on the turn: “You’re not going to hold the same beliefs that you had at 16 complexions. More surprisingly, they retain their old convictions, puzzled that they are the only ones of the old gang to have kept them. A little solemnly, Spike tells us: “My life has been devoted to a cause that has sometimes seemed impossibly remote and retreating from its realisation… And, as a result, we have lived lives of quiet satisfaction; lives of the utmost insignificance”. Their convictions manifest themselves principally in the odd attempt at arson directed at local estate agents.

Spike’s account of himself leaves one with mixed feelings about him. There is an integrity in his refusal to dilute his principles. But there is also a hint of smugness, of fatalism and an inverted vainglory. Paradoxically, the fictional figure he reminds me of most is the “fine Old Tory of the ancient school” that Trollope described so marvellously in The Eustace Diamonds, a man pleased about having “been always in the right, and yet always on the losing side; always being ruined, always under persecution… and yet never [losing] anything”.

What I missed most of all in this book was a sense that there might be alternatives to this unhappy choice between cynicism and wilful naïveté. Iris Murdoch, confronted by A N Wilson with the facts of her drift, or “lurch”, to conservative attitudes, is said to have replied: “I don’t like the images of lurching or drifting. I have thought about these matters.” A Small Revolution in Germany left me wondering if there could be an honourable way to grow up politically, a thoughtful way.

Hensher’s previous fiction suggests that he has thought hard about these questions. He has been caustic about Left-wing cluelessness before – in The Northern Clemency, a character takes a swipe at the urban socialist whose contribution to the miners’ strike was to donate a can of chickpeas. But he has always had time for dissidents, the odd men out: the gay couple who run extremely well-catered orgies for the “bears” of Devon and Somerset (King of the Badgers), Bengali nationalists in the Seventies (The Friendly Ones and Scenes from Early Life), and the Bauhaus artists, who are depicted with such sharp sympathy in The Emperor Waltz. The tone this time is more ambivalent, a little darker, as if the novelist is looking for a way to love the radicalism without loving the radical.

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