The British Museum is Falling Down is a brilliant comic satire of academia, religion and human entanglements. First published in 1965, it tells the story of hapless, scooter-riding young research student Adam Appleby, who is trying to write his thesis but is constantly distracted — not least by the fact that, as Catholics in the late 1960s, he and his wife must rely on ‘Vatican roulette’ to avoid a fourth child.