Publisher's Synopsis
Mr. Burgess should have added the name of Robert Louis Stevenson to the list of five individuals beginning with Scheherazade, to whom he has dedicated his book. The method of "Find the Woman" is the method of the "New Arabian Nights," but the manner is Mr. Burgess's own. Upon a thread of mystery and adventure he has strung a dozen short stories, some of them more frankly impossible than others, but most of them funny and nearly all of them cleverly done. The story of the Great Yale Funeral, which seems to he built around a kernel of fact, is altogether delightful. Another chapter is evidently intended as a tribute to the memory of Richard Mansfield. There are two pages in the book on which the smile develops into a roar. They have to do with the sanctimonious Dr. Hopbottom, with whom profane utterance takes the form of an orgy in technical and scientific terminology. Dr. Hopbottom addresses an Irish truck-driver as follows:
What diacritical right has a binomial oxypendactlle advoutrous holoblastlc rhizopod like you. got with your trlnoctial ustilaginous Westphalian holocaust blocking up the telcostean way for, anyway! If you give me any more of your lunarian, snorto-maniac hyperbolic pylorectomy, I'll skive you into a megalopteric diatomorilerous auxospore!
This is not very subtle humor, but the reviewer, while copying out the foregoing sentences, laughed anew.
--The Nation, Volume 93
