Welcome to St Cloud’s, an exclusive public school where the boys prefer rouge to rugger and bondage to bunsen burners. Here, courtesy of new boy Basil Leaf and the postcards he writes to his long-suffering father, you’ll meet the ‘criminally pretty’ Gemini Tarqquogan, who paints his nails scarlet and wears frocks and feathers; Courtney Durham, who runs up curtains on his sewing machine; Hugo Bletchworth, keen on leatherwear and flagellation; Father Absolute, Basil’s gin-swilling Father Confessor; Rory O’Brien, St Cloud’s rugger coach and Courtney Durham’s ‘close companion’. Then there are Basil’s camp followers, so to speak: Nipper Thompson, a spirited jockey sacked by his guv’nor for wearing earrings at the morning gallop; Maurice Le Vere, a former ballet dancer and owner of The Last Faerie, a notorious watering hole; Sir Geoffrey Grassington, a local magistrate and the proprietor of a palace of pleasure, wherein Basil and his chums bring comfort to wealthy gentlemen of unusual tastes, until the men from MI5 move in... Dear Popsy is an outrageous, madly comic book, brimming with zip and exuberance. Michael Palin, of Monty Python fame, said: ‘Very, very funny, wonderful turns of phrase, carries on where Decline and Fall left off, I think I am jealous.’* And Goodreads’ reviewers have given it five-star ratings. Dear Popsy was first published by Andrew Deutsch and later by Penguin. This is the third edition of this popular book