1. I looked at Martin and smiled broadly ..." Tessa herself, it seems, does not see the lewd (and indeed ludic) possibilities of this beginning until they are pointed out to her by the group.

2. Run by one Colonel Kearney, a cigar–smoking American entrepreneur and hog–loving dreamer, who owes not a little to Uncle Sam, Carter‘s circus is a vast "ludic game". Her tragic clowns grow into their masks.

3. Marks & Spencer has phased them out because they are "inappropriate". I am no big fan of these magazines, but it seems to me that in the '0s there was a ludic, postmodern sense of mischief when FHM put a naked woman on the cover, a kind of nose–thumbing "Come and get me, you bra–burners!" that – though very childish and sharing with a lot of postmodernism a tinny, formulaic inauthenticity – was at least funny.

4. Although it‘s true the traditional twist in the tail now often feels cheap and tired, it can still work (Margaret Atwood‘s Hairball, to take a random example). In his essay, Boyd identified seven types of short story, beginning with the "event–plot story", one of its earliest forms, in which "the skeleton of plot is all important, the narrative is shaped, classically, to have a beginning, middle and end". But there are six others÷ the self–explanatory "Chekhovian story"; the "modernist story" – Hemingway, for example; the "cryptic/ludic story – Nabokov and Borges; the "mini–novel story" – Chekhov again; the "poetic/mythic" – Dylan Thomas, DH Lawrence, JG Ballard, Ted Hughes and Frank O‘Hara; the biographical – Borges again and Boyd himself.