The party's hapless attempts to rebrand itself conquered new summits of preposterousness when Mr Hague returned from America espousing "kitchen-table conservatism", and went on to install such a table in Tory headquarters, giving shape if not clarity to this perplexing metaphor.
Adventure stories and spy novels may have a healthy enough astringency, and the very preposterousness of some adventures can be a safeguard against any impressionable young reader's neglecting the claims of real life to dream of becoming a secret agent.
In fantasy, the farcical note was struck with agreeable preposterousness by Oliver Butterworth in The Enormous Egg (1956) and The Trouble with Jenny's Ear (1960).
Where Take That fall down is their ability as lyricists, with pastoral preposterousness such as "The Garden".
A lot of comics want to be taken seriously and don't see the pure preposterousness of that notion.
Their suites are shrines to clogged wealth that would make Donatella Versace look understated; once installed there, handsome Arab manservants swarm about, tending to their whims, and costume designer Patricia Field outdoes herself in whipping up "creations" of breathtaking preposterousness.
Thanks to some fine performances here, we feel the pain as well as the preposterousness of posturing in the light of imagined posterity, of wanting to be examplary pioneers only to be made an example of.
(As Nancy Franklin wrote in her 2005 review, "'Lost' doesn't tiptoe around the perimeter of preposterousness — it charges right into it").
In "Gunga Din," when Grant, as the soldier Cutter, receives an invitation to a regimental ball, he reads the salutation aloud — "Arch-i-bald Cutter" — chewing the syllables and savoring their preposterousness.
If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
With their Rube Goldberg-esque ingenuity, their elaborateness directly proportional to their preposterousness, these can end up looking suspiciously like madness.
