...The Flower Beneath The Foot by Ronald Firbank. A strange book, apparently an influence on Waugh's Black Mischief, but as far from Waugh as you can get in some ways. It's as if one of ER Eddisson's post-Ouroboros ponderances about archetypes and exemplars afoot in Zimimavia were to be taken over by Wilde, brought back down to earth and made stranger, funnier, more subversive and more resonant in the process. I almost wrote that it is like the novel Huysmans' Des Esseintes would write, but Firbank was both more knowing and more self-aware than that tragicomic synsesthete.