08 Aug 2026
issue 08 August 2026
Comments
For Competition 3461 you were asked to submit toe-curling analogies.This invitation produced a stream of entries that were glorious in their banal, laboured, overwrought and tasteless awfulness. Bad writing, it turns out, has some high-brow admirers: the notoriously dreadful poet and novelist Amanda McKittrick Ross’s fans included Aldous Huxley, C.S Lewis and Siegfried Sassoon, while Mark Twain pronounced her novel Irene Iddesleigh ‘one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time’.
The offerings below earn their authors a £5 John Lewis voucher per analogy printed.
