Subtext: A Whimsical Look at Men (Women Too) and Manners

Erudite humour in literature is a tricky business. However, in this marvellously wide-ranging curiosity shop of mirthful and incisive essays on the vagaries of the human condition, Professor Sukumar Nayar hits the mark. With delightful abandon, Nayar—India-born and Queen's English groomed— serves up a banquet of little known facts, absurdities, and wisdoms. He ranges across such topics as the hidden secrets of numbers ("zero is the most elegant and sensual"), the breathtaking beauty of Indian poet Tagore ("Let me but truly possess the things I spurned and overlooked"), the absurdity and plasticity of the English language (oxymorons "freezer burn" and "steel wool"), and the shocking poignancy of a multi-page, single-word book on the Holocaust from which he sagaciously observes, "the world is a tapestry torn".