At university I was given a secondhand copy of a literary anthology, with a free form novel-in-progress attached. The book had been owned by a celebrated Upper Canada College academic, who had scribbled thousands of scholarly homeboy in-jokes in the margins – mostly punning stories revolving around the word “cock,” but also picaresque, rollicking dialogue from characters dubbed Sir Toby Felch and The Bloomsbury Ovoid. The Queen was in there too, along with garden parties, dotty lecturers, and other dusty staples of Oxbridge satire. Even then – in a mid-1980s university world of media studies and multiculturalism – most of these high jinks were poignantly archaic, fossils from a lost world where everyone understood Classics-inspired double entendres.

Lydia Thrippe! A Critic’s Diary Followed by the Lydiad is just such a throwback, a curate’s egg in two parts. Lydia Thrippe is a fictitious middle-aged professor, a scheming diva with countless grudges against her academic peers, an unforgiving wit, and a crammed social calendar of classes, luncheons, and awards ceremonies. The Diary presents us with a giddy whirl of Thrippe’s misadventures, featuring characters such as the nutty Liebnitz scholar L.L. Spirge, the dirty pastry cook Mr. Toon, sex-crazed Lillian (“likes leather and aviators”), and the seance medium Frau McCarthy (“keeps chickens that may not be what they appear”). All of them are supposed to be alive and well in contemporary Ontario, but behave as if they’ve fallen off a Cambridge punt circa 1947.

The Lydiad is an appendage to the diaries, consisting of 20-odd fanciful parables allegedly written by Thrippe and retrieved after her death. Each of these cautionary tales starts with a whimsical punch line: “Alphonse lost his leg in a manhole in Surrey, England”; “Trudy had a crotch beautiful.” In total they make for the most uncanny reading imaginable. It’s as if author Daniel Sloate immersed himself in the world of postwar BBC Radio, descended into madness, and ended up with the prose style of a cross-dressing Spike Milligan. No doubt this book is funny for some – for the rest of us, though, it’s almost scarily antique.