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| | Books | Where's that poker? |
 | | When the heroine, a timid Oxford postgrad called Gaby, first sets eyes on her love-object, Piers Gaveston, she says "I almost choked on my cigarette", which rather makes one wonder why she was eating a cigarette in the first place. |
 | | Since Gaveston is the king's "favourite" in Marlowe's Edward II, and since Piers Gaveston's mentor Sir Edward is, well, called Edward, the relationship between the two is obvious to the reader from the novel's first pages. |
 | | Gaveston might be read straight, as an attempt at melding a literary approach to romantic tropes with a satire on the mores of higher education and the media. |
| books.guardian.co.uk /print/0,3858,4433642-110738,00.html (611 words) |
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