Competition: merge some literary greats

This year saw the largest-ever merger between two publishing houses when Penguin and Random House joined forces in an attempt to compete with the might of Amazon. You are invited to effect a literary merger of a different kind by blending two existing well-known books and providing a synopsis of the new title.

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Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

Thanks to Lawrence Douglas and Alexander George, who dreamt up this particular literary parlour game, giving us The Old Man and the Flea, ‘Hemingway’s classic as seen through a mirror Kafkaesquely, which finds the protagonist wrestling now not with a marlin but — yet more symbolically still — with a flea’.

Please email entries of 150 words maximum to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 2 October and mark them Competition 2818.