The Daily Mail, never ashamed to have its cake, eat it, offer the cake around and then accuse you of being a greedy, fat cake-eating BBC leftie, may have plumbed new depths of hypocrisy in its latest war with the corporation.

After reading the paper’s frothing rage at BBC Radio 4’s decision to select Hilary Mantel’s short story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher as one of its Books at Bedtime, Monkey thought he’d try and get hold of a copy to see what all the fuss was about.

And which Stalinist, anarchist, nihilist backstreet niche bookseller did Monkey find to sell him the book the Mail calls “sick” and “perverted”? Why none other than the Mail’s very own bookshop, of course. What’s more, the collection is called “brilliant”.

Selling Mantel’s short story collection at the discounted price of £10.95 ( RRP £14.99 !), the site reads:

A brilliant - and rather transgressive - collection of short stories from the double Man Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘Bring Up the Bodies’

Well, as the Mail’s Richard Littlejohn might say – you couldn’t make it up!