›Slowly, slowly in the wind‹: Patricia Highsmith begins her modern-day tale of Romeo and Juliet in poetically suggestive fashion. Peter loves Maggie, and Maggie loves Peter. But their fathers, big landowners in Coldstream Heights, Maine, are as implacable enemies as Shakespeares Montagues and Capulets, intent on driving out all trace of poetry from their children. At any cost. Who would be surprised, therefore, to learn that the poetic opening is a quotation from the Watergate scandal, and that the object dangling in the wind is a hanged man! Twelve psychological stories from the Seventies about the dream of love and happiness and just how far modern people - young parents, lovers, lonely big-city inhabitants - are prepared to go in order to realise it.