New Cold War ‘will trigger tedious spy novels’

A NEW Cold War could result in hundreds of incomprehensible spy novels, experts have warned.

There will be some sort of chess thing on the cover

With tensions growing between the West and Russia, book publishers fear a resurgence of convoluted thrillers with portentous titles like The Kremlin Sanction.

Publisher Stephen Malley said: “When the Cold War ended we thought we’d never have to read another spy novel where you have to keep going back a few pages to remember what’s going on.

“But thanks to Putin arsing around in Ukraine, the bestseller list will soon be full of books about jaded middle-aged men trying to uncover a double-agent in Prague, or something else that’s quite hard to care about.

“They will also feature dozens of Russian characters who you keep getting confused with each other. Not that it matters because you won’t know whose side anyone is on until the last few pages.

“There might be a bit of badly written sex with a Russian woman who dies to avoid cluttering up the sequel, but mainly it’ll be people hanging around parks in Moscow.”

Spy author Roy Hobbs, who writes under the pen-name Jack Vanguard, said: “My new novel, The Groznograd Protocol, is fucking impenetrable, and I’m still only on the first page.

“I’m just hoping there isn’t a real nuclear war before my advance comes though.”

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'Arm' removed from dictionary to make room for 'vape'

THE word ‘arm’ has been deleted from the Oxford English Dictionary to accommodate ‘vape’.

Otherwise this would be ‘going for a suck’

The dictionary replaces old words on an annual basis, meaning that they can no longer be written or spoken by anyone.

Editor Susan Traherne said: “I don’t know if you’ve got a copy of the OED, but it’s pretty fucking big already so we’ve been operating a one-in one-out policy since 2002.

“For example when ‘staycation’ went in ‘nuts’ went out, which is why they’ve been referred to as Dry Roasted Single-Seed Hard Fruits ever since.

“I think we can all agree that ‘vape’ – I vape, he has vaped, she enjoys vaping – is much more useful than a word for the collection of bone, muscle and soft tissue that connects the hand to the shoulder.”

Also added to the dictionary this year are ‘vlogger’, ‘bae’, ‘spornosexual’ and ‘normcore’, necessitating the removal of ‘fire’, ‘look’, ‘why’ and the preposition ‘of.’

Carolyn Ryan of Colchester said: “Couldn’t they have dumped some word like ‘bedizened’ or ‘horripilation’ that only Will Self uses, instead — a perfectly useful one?

“— have you done this, you arsewipes?

“And they left ‘arsewipes’ in?”