Portuguese Irregular Verbs is a short comic novel by Alexander McCall Smith, and the first of McCall Smith's series of novels featuring Professor Dr von Igelfeld. It was first published in 1997. Some consider the book to be a series of connected short stories. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, a pompous professor of Romance languages, graduates from college, and works hard to write a tome on Portuguese irregular verbs, his claim to academic fame. He talks and talks about it at conferences, usually attending with his two closest colleagues. They encounter the world outside academia with entertaining clumsiness. One review says the main character is "a gentle figure who deserves every cartoon anvil that falls on his head", in the humorous tradition of fictional characters Mr. Samuel Pickwick (in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens), Bouvard and Pécuchet (in an unfinished work by Gustave Flaubert), and Mr Pooter of Diary of a Nobody. Another reviewer considers the book to be a series of connected short stories, "gentle farces", "where much is made of nothing -- to great comic effect." That reviewer likens the stories to E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia books. Plot summary German professor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld feels that he is not accorded the scholarly recognition and veneration he deserves, though he has a good position as a philologist at the Institute of Romance Philology in Regensburg, Germany. Von Igelfeld is extremely tall, like his closest colleagues. They are professors Dr Dr (honoris causa) Florianus Prinzel and Dr Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer. Von Igelfeld is plagued by envy and suspicion of them. The old Irish language was the first interest of von Igelfeld in pursuing his doctoral studies. He moves to Munich to work under an expert in Irish. They go on a field trip to Cork, where they are directed to a man in the west who will not let them in his home; rather he shouts invective at them for an hour until they leave. Von Igelfeld takes it down phonetically, to learn later that all the vocabulary are curse words based in pornography. His landlady sees the page of Irish (translated into German) in his room, and throws him out on the spot. He had already been considering irregular verbs as a topic of greater interest, so he parts from the unsupportive professor in Munich for the study of Romance languages at the University of Wiesbaden. Professor von