Foreign Affairs is a novel by Alison Lurie. It concerns itself with American academics in England. Unmarried, fifty-four year-old Virginia Miner (Vinnie), a professor at Corinth University who specializes in children's literature, is off to London for another research trip. She loves England and likes to feel that she fits in well there. She is hoping to produce an important new book about playground rhymes. However, she finds that her work has been trashed by a critic, L. D. Zimmern of Columbia, for whom she imagines monstrous dooms.