Hilary Byrd threw a wild party to celebrate his Poet Laureateship. The cast numbered every shade of human eccentricity, from a fuddled old duke to a dope-smoking butler. There were polite dwarfs, mincing poofs, bloated poets, hungry nymphomaniacs, a vodka-sodden Nobel prizewinner; there were Harry Bartatt, the Yorkshire sculptor, and fretful Eric Wetley, dressed entirely in rubber.

In this harshly witty dunciad, Dylan Thomas and John Davenport collaborated to lampoon many of their most distinguished contemporaries. But in 1941 these caricatures virtually amounted to a series of scabrous libels. Over thirty years later, their impact softened, the book can be published, and T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Augustus John, Henry Moore and many more are ruthlessly parodied as well as the authors themselves.

But the book is also a surreal murder thriller... Who killed the 'King's Canary'?