The Sitwells, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group are among the writers satirised.

In an episodic structure, the story follows a young simpleton called Dan Boleyn as he travels the London art world.

A contributing basis on which the story was constructed was Lewis' belief that the English Victorian past constricts the "revolutionary consciousness", which potentially could be expressed through modern art and literature.

[1] Lewis's "enemies", such as his patron Sidney Schiff (and his wife), Edward Wadsworth (a fellow Vorticist) and John Rodker, along with members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Lytton Strachey, are recognisable under fictional names and are treated with savage humour.

[2] The political and cultural 'diagnosis' of England that the novel aspires to make is partly a development of the ideas put forward by Lewis in his 1926 book, The Art of Being Ruled.