I also read "surely see", fwiw, though if that's the case it's a rather blotchy u.

Slightly more recently, try Alexander McCall Smith's Portuguese Irregular Verbs for some excellent academic humour, though the main character is the butt of the jokes in a way that doesn't really lend itself to a happy ending.

In that case, it's even older than Wodehouse, but Three Men in a Boat is a classic book of virtually no stakes and virtually all jokes. No good for market research but well worth reading if you haven't.

These were actually the articles that got me started on the Lappenberg connection - really interesting, both of them!

Thank you both for bringing this to my attention! I asked our library to buy a copy of the Grimm-Lappenberg correspondence a while ago, and this reminded me that I never checked whether the order had gone through. (It has, hurrah!)

Also worth bearing in mind that the Cambridge WOTY choice is based on user lookups; interest spiked in 2025, but there had to be enough existing evidence of usage for "parasocial" to have made it into the dictionary *to* be looked up!

I struggle to imagine an examiner who wouldn't be ok with that, although to be honest I spent most of my viva so high on adrenaline that I can barely remember a thing about it!

Congratulations! My only bit of advice is one you have probably received already, but don't be afraid to write on the thing. That goes for the viva itself but also afterwards - all those 'oh I wish I'd known that when working on the thesis' thoughts can in fact be stored in your thesis!