"1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiance;e is strangely altered and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games...

The children of the unstable and eccentric Piers and Clare Aubrey must learn to make do, in a story taking place in the London suburbs in the years leading up to World War One.

The editors of this legendary and hilarious anthology write: "It would seem at a hasty glance that to make an anthology of Bad Verse is on the whole a simple matter ... On the contrary ... There is bad Bad Verse and good Bad Verse." Here one finds the best of the worst of the greatest English poets, with an index ("Manure, adjudged a fit subject for the Muse, page 91") that is itself an inspired work of folly. Annotation. Just in time for National...