A black, bleak comedy of contemporary campus chaos. Acronyms, committees and statistics abound at the University of East Midlands, a vast net to entrap the unwary ambitions of its hapless academics, who are forced to run the gauntlet of budgetary pressures and even management consultants under the sinister and manipulative eye of EMU's V-C Sir Stanley Oxborrow before they can even begin the business of research and teaching. Sexual predators and lounge lizards are the least of the worries that afflict Professor Lydia Malinder and her colleagues; in the university of today they have to justify their existence on a daily basis. Ann Oakley's new novel is a lightly handled but nevertheless intense debunking of the horrors of contemporary university life, and one that, in these days of 'education, education, education', would be eminently publicisable.