his girlfriend – and later wife and acclaimed producer – Jenny de Woolf, and his housemate Gary, he writes and claims to have discovered a lost manuscript by Charles Dickens which dealt with the child sex trade. The discovery brings Jenny and the college fame, but it also results in a dialogue between Adrian and Hugo, who has become an alcoholic. Hugo believes that Adrian hates him, and points to Adrian's duplicity as proof. Adrian corrects him and the two leave things on a friendly note. After graduation, Adrian attends a farcical meeting where he and other attendees discuss the arrest of Trefusis, who was arrested on charges of cottaging, sabotaging the footage of an onlooking BBC film crew. It is later revealed that he was actually undertaking a document exchange preceded by two kisses on the cheek as is custom in several European countries, such as Hungary. Adrian joins Trefusis in a forced sabbatical, which they claim to spend studying the fricative shift in English. In actuality, the year is spent in a game of espionage in which they must acquire the parts for Mendax (from the Latin adjective meaning "lying, deceptive"), a lie-inhibiting device from his Hungarian friend Szabó. A showdown results with Adrian's uncle David (Sir David Pearce of MI5) and Trefusis, during which it is revealed that Pearce's aide was a double agent working for Trefusis. It is also revealed that the murders that Adrian witnessed were staged to scare Trefusis into giving Mendax to MI5, and that Mendax was fictional. Subsequently, Adrian overhears a conversation between Trefusis and Pearce where it is revealed that the espionage adventure was just a game to counter boredom, meaning that several parts of the story were untrue. Adrian remembers a letter written to him by de Woolf saying that while young girls grew up, young boys did not, making their education irrelevant and just a game. The book concludes with Adrian, now a Cambridge fellow, recruiting a new spy for a new game. Autobiographical elements The novel is semi-autobiographical and many scenes echo experiences later recounted in Fry's memoir, Moab is My Washpot. The character Trefusis was created by Fry for several humorous radio broadcasts on BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends. Conceits The espionage portions of the book are written in italics, which stop at Adrian's graduation. The book features a third-person omniscient narrator. The narrator knows, for example,