Bound with New Ropes

A sexual harassment tribunal’s distorted decision spurs a young university lecturer to seek revenge. With new-found guile he lays siege to the enemy – a honey-tongued clique of shadowy self-awarding despots. As he breaches their Florentine tower, its spiky shepherds and hollow heroines discard their counterfeit haloes and bogusly tolerant sociology to guard its foundations of sand. Once embattled, all expose their truer and sharper colours.‘New’ is the essential word in the title – the modern ropes of duplicity and fake virtue.This tale begins in Oxford in 1988 when a timid and vulnerable lecturer is used as a scapegoat by a circle of pseudo-enlightened political poseurs. Emboldened by desperation, he unearths by illicit means, evidence of subversion and fraud beneath their avant-garde camouflage. Unravelling like a chain-reaction, dark encounters with spiteful bright nymphs and wily scary bureaucrats, lead this supposed upstart nobody – stepping-stone-like – from youthful naïvety through daring adventures to good-natured and illusion-free asceticism.