Rapier-tongued lecturer Ben Butley is having a monumentally bad day. So bad, he's making sure everyone else has a worse one. His estranged wife has taken up with the most boring man in London. His beloved protege has found a new benefactor (one he is actually sleeping with, to boot). In an unprecedented act of betrayal even the English department's resident failure has a book deal.

Once a charismatic tutor and an authority on TS Eliot, he now sharpens his mind on his unfortunate colleagues while trying to evade his more persistent students. Withering irony, spite and gleeful trouble-making all feature in his arsenal; inevitably they prove to be the weapons of his own tragic self-destruction.