Thomas Love Peacock's satirical novels are wicked parodies. Headlong Hall  and Nightmare Abbey are comic Platonic Symposia where characters who are either representative types or thinly veiled caricatures of Peacock's contemporaries gather in country houses to eat, drink and discuss. Peacock pokes fun at contemporary attitudes and ideas, but it is genial stuff. In Nightmare Abbey he caricatures his close friend Shelley along with Byron and Coleridge as he derides the Romantic literary movement of the absurdities he exposes conveys a powerful sense of energy and a joviality that is irresistible.

So the back of the book sounds pretty pants. Mum, however, assures me that Nightmare Abbey is a hilarious read, satirising great authors of the day. It sounds like fun, and I do trust mum's taste and sense of humour. The point of her buying this for me was to prove to me that classic literature didn't have to be all Bronte and Austin, with their simpering bints and dodgy romances. I hope she proves her point.