Haywire

‘Our greatest living satirist’ Sunday Times

‘The most screamingly funny living writer’ Mail on Sunday

From the bestselling and award-winning author of Ma'am Darling and One Two Three Four, a selection of Craig Brown's finest writing collected together for the first time.

Haywire presents a survival guide to the 21st century.

The acclaimed biographer of Princess Margaret and The Beatles considers such diverse topics as gloves, outer space, the Marx Brothers, Richard Dawkins, Hitler’s hair, John Stonehouse, Katie Price, tongue-twisters, Bruce Springsteen, Harry and Meghan, Stanley Spencer, Brian Epstein, Downton Abbey, Sigmund Freud and Karl Lagerfeld’s cat.

With the full battery of the humourist's armoury – clerihews, tongue twisters, whimsy, parody, farce, satire, social observation, nonsense – Brown skewers the fads and delusions of the contemporary world.

Reviews

‘The most screamingly funny living writer’ Barry Humphries, Mail on Sunday

‘The greatest satirist since Max Beerbohm’ Elaine Showalter Guardian

‘Craig Brown's humour will outlive his victims. His journalism is one of the few compensations for being British now’ David Sexton, Sunday Telegraph

‘A genius … in every instance, the skill of the parodist dwarfs any achievement attributable to his subject’ Auberon Waugh, Daily Telegraph

‘He is the comic writer the rest of us admire from afar, and envy beyond the bounds of reason. How does he do it?’ Markus Berkmann, Spectator

‘Britain’s wittiest satirist’ The Times

‘[Craig Brown] has an acutely attuned comic ear, an unmatched eye for spotting the absurdities of human behaviour and a bloodhound-grade nose for sniffing out phoniness and pretension’ Mail On Sunday

About the author

Craig Brown’s last book, One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time won the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. His previous book, Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret won the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature, and was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US. His first article appeared in the New Statesman in 1978. Since then, he has written for many newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the New York Times and the Spectator. He has been writing the parodic celebrity diary for Private Eye for over thirty years. He lives in Aldeburgh, Suffolk with his wife Frances Welch; they have two children and a grandchild.