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As readers of Private Eye’s parodic Diary column already know, Craig Brown is Britain’s funniest balloon burster, gleefully taking his needle to the great and good of showbiz, society and politics, plus Jeffrey Archer. As readers of Brown’s wonderful recent biographies of Princess Margaret (Ma’am Darling) and The Beatles (One Two Three Four) can further confirm, he is also one of our most astute, entertaining and waspish commentators on contemporary British culture.
Haywire is a handsomely jacketed collection of Brown’s satirical columns, essays, reviews and more from the past 15 years, for publications including the New Statesman, Vanity Fair and the New York Review of Books, as well as the Eye. Come for the merciless takedowns of attention-seeking gargoyles of our times (Piers Morgan, Jacob Rees-Mogg), stay for the insightful pen-portraits of peculiar, and peculiarly English, comedy legends (Kenneth Williams, Peter Cook). Revel in the skewerings of puffed-up public figures (Richard Dawkins, Alan Yentob), but also make time for wise and witty considerations of British painters (Stanley Spencer), writers (Kingsley Amis) and even an American rock star (Bruce Springsteen). All these are learned, punchy, and to the point. This Christmas, don’t buy your dyspeptic uncle a novelty corkscrew, get him Haywire instead.
While you’re at it, pick up a copy of Marina Hyde’s equally excellent What Just Happened?!, a collection of newspaper columns that functions as a phantasmagoric running commentary on our whiplash lives and times.
What, you may reasonably ask, on this dying planet of ours at this moment of widespread argh and grr, would possess anyone to want to spend even a minute of their time reminding themselves of the past few years in British public life, from Brexit to the pandemic and beyond? Surely only a collection of Hyde’s livid, electrifying and viciously funny work for the Guardian.
What Just Happened?!: Dispatches from Turbulent Times
What Just Happened?!: Dispatches from Turbulent Times
If there could possibly be said to be a silver lining to the shit-shroud we’ve all had to wear over the past six years (Hyde’s book begins in 2016), it is the fact that desperate times make for extremely funny journalism. And as the many national crises deepen, and the situation worsens, and the Great British Car Crash becomes a six-lane pile-up, so Hyde’s imagination runs riot, her writing becomes wilder and more fantastic. Righteously angry, too.
Tom Lehrer declared that satire died the day Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. Hyde would disagree, as she argued in a piercing recent piece for Esquire. I suspect Craig Brown would second her on that. Sniggering at our betters might not get us anywhere. But it’s important to keep doing it, while we still can.
Haywire: The Best of Craig Brown (4th Estate, £25) and What Just Happened?!: Dispatches from Turbulent Times by Marina Hyde (Faber, £20) are both out now.
