Books: Time, ladies and gentlemen, please

Is that Mrs Woolf, in a room of her own? And Monsieur Camus, outside? Felix Bennett invites you to the last literary party of the century

How To Party on Parnassus

EVERY READER has wondered how Jane Austen would bond with Barbara Cartland, should they happen to rub shoulders at the Groucho Club.

And if 35 literary luminaries of the 20th century, alive or dead, got together in some Parnassian drawing room for a final millennium party, how would they get on?

Would Virginia Woolf find Alan Bennett her cup of tea? What would Enid Blyton make of Irvine Welsh? Would Sylvia (Plath) and Bridget (Jones) get slightly sloshed on Chardonnay? Would all the scribes with beards congregate in one corner?

And how would you keep Charles Bukowski and William Faulkner from trashing the bar?

Cartoonist Felix Bennett draws you into the last literary knees-up of the century.

The Literator

A KEY TO THE GUESTS

1/ James Joyce

2/ George Bernard Shaw

3/ Raymond Carver

4/ Salman Rushdie

5/ Charles Bukowski

6/ Graham Greene

7/ Virginia Woolf

8/ Vladimir Nabokov (and friend)

9/ Joseph Conrad

10/ William S Burroughs

11/ Albert Camus

12/ Georges Perec

13/ Sylvia Plath

14/ Alan Bennett

15/ Franz Kafka

16/ William Faulkner

17/ Agatha Christie

18/ Umberto Eco

19/ Chinua Achebe

20/ Georgette Heyer

21/ Enid Blyton

22/ Beryl Bainbridge

23/ Barbara Cartland

24/ George Orwell

25/ Martin Amis

26/ Kingsley Amis

27/ William Golding

28/ Norman Mailer

29/ Ernest Hemingway

30/ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

31/ Daphne du Maurier

32/ Boris Pasternak

33/ Anna Akhmatova

34/ Truman Capote

35/ "Bridget Jones"