"We cannot live without story." Hearing these words cleared up an unease that tutorials with three annual writers-in-residence in succession at TCD had not. The curiosity of humans for news, novelty and notoriety is innate; it is the first question we put upon meeting up again with a friend: what news? The words were spoken by a fourth guest writer, and one who proves the truth of the maxim today by writing a weekly column of whimsy for the Irish Times; they dispelled for the present writer then the notion that non-communicative writing was an idle pursuit.

From the roll-call of Anglo-Irish writers one master of whimsy emerges: Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18^th Baron Dunsany, known to literature as Lord Dunsany.

He is creator of Jorkens, lounge lizard of the Billiards gentlemen's club who regales his fellow members (and us readers) with tall tales that stretch credulity to the point of fantasy, but temptingly also lead us along the boundary of reality so that we and they end up suspending disbelief.

Jorkens, Dunsany himself in the persona of the narrator assures us, is honourably intent on returning the hospitality of his club hearers who ply him with whiskey 'to moisten his throat' – just as soon as certain dividends upon which he daily waits show up in his bank account.

You get the picture: the German illustrator, Paul Flora, has a style which literally stretches the imagination, as do the tales themselves.

The dramatic enactment unfolds with the lethargic, somewhat befuddled reactions of Jorkens' hearers. Smetters, a travelling salesman for a brand of table sauce, is usually the one who ventures an anecdote, only to be upstaged at once by Jorkens, who goes one better. Jorkens is not given a free run, however; he is interrupted by the sceptic, Terbut, whose efforts only spur Jorkens to more ingenious invention.

One such tale, 'The Rebuff', is a piece of humorous science fiction with a Dunsany touch of the macabre at the end. A wealthy lady at the end of the 1800s has left a substantial sum of money to science that contact might be made with Mars. A group of French scientists propose, ludicrously, to lay out a geometric symbol for the Martians by means of fire signals the length of metropolitan France. The French government decides that the lady was not compos mentis, and awards the legacy to relatives (you can feel the dismay of the eager fantasist club listeners). The scientists had argued, quite plausibly, that Mars, being a smaller planet, would have cooled down a lot sooner than the Earth and so life there would have emerged earlier, the inhabitants learned earlier from the same mistakes, and so become even more intelligent than earthlings (you can hear the satire). The scientists betake themselves instead to the Sahara in French colonial Africa and lay out there an enormous Pythagoras triangle. 

A reply is observed, also geometric, more extended, but without a hypotenuse, somewhat like a lamppost, as one of the club members observes – or a gallows, Jorkens interjects; the Martians' answer is: 'go hang yourselves!'

Not quite suitable for retelling in class, at least not without modification. One other and longer story certainly could hardly be objected to, even today. 'The Cut' is the story, told by Jorkens of course, of a dog who is taught by his master to go to the newsagent's with a penny in his mouth for the daily paper, and then to the farm for eggs with a basket in his muzzle, and so on to errands involving pound notes. The dog learns the value of money, wanders off to another town, and sells himself (he is famous by this time) to another owner by begging, note by note, for five pounds. The dog thereupon honourably attaches himself to the new owner and duly buries his new-found wealth. Acting on his own account, the dog goes shopping: for a collar, a cravat and a short walking cane, carried between his teeth; he has even been seen window-shopping at the hatter's. The residents of the new town are amused and take to saluting the dog as he passes by, until one day a gentleman known to the dog ventures into the street in a hurry without a collar or tie, salutes the dog in passing – and is cut: the dog snubs him!

Matters come to a head: the former owner sues, but loses the case as the dog affirms his new loyalty, bought for due consideration.

The moral in the story, a veritable fable, mocks the vanity of humans who must signal their social self-estimation by their apparel and accessories. At fifteen pages, it is told with a delicious tongue in cheek seriousness. Surely, a useful text for teaching literature?