A crisis looms in the tweedy world of scholarly publishing: the money men have discovered that it is an untapped source of profits. Their unlikely weapon is Henri de Klompenmaker, an accountant turned publisher who, in league with the monumentally mediocre Professor Leslie Fyfe, MBE, plums new depths of shady business practice. Sir Henry Wiseman, Nobel Prize-winner, and Master of St Leonard's College, Oxford, is outraged and is determined to expose them. He finds a willing ally in Marlene Pym, the burra memsahib of the London publishing world. This richly amusing tale of the tensions between money, scholarship and business is a witty exposé of a rarefied world in which the protagonists fully indulge their passion for Machiavellian schemes.