Haywire: The Best of Craig Brown

Written by Craig Brown

Narrated by Craig Brown, Jan Ravens and Kieran Hodgson

‘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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Release date: Nov 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9780008557478

Craig Brown

Craig Brown has been writing the parodic celebrity diary for Private Eye since 1989. He has written for a rich variety of publications, including the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Spectator. His books include One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and Ma’am Darling, which won the James Tait Black award.

Reviews for Haywire

[gpower61 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Satire, in Britain at least, has largely been reduced to TV and radio panel shows in which assemblies of stand-ups trot out mechanical gags about the week’s news. The studio audiences dutifully howl hysterically but most of the supposedly satirical barbs are toothless; the banality of the humour effortlessly upstaged by the surrealism of reality.At least Private Eye magazine, sole survivor of the ‘60s ‘satire boom’, remains funny. The Eye is at once reassuringly familiar and perpetually anarchic. I always turn first to the Diary column to find out who the guest celebrity diarist is this time. Except, it doesn’t really matter who it is, because all the diarists are actually the same person: Craig Brown. Brown’s incredibly funny pieces are a form of literary impersonation in which his subjects, or perhaps that should be victims, are rendered larger than life at the same time as they are cut down to size. He possesses the verbal equivalent of the caricaturist’s gift for identifying the one character trait which hilariously illuminates and explodes an entire personality. As manipulated by the master ventriloquist Brown the likes of Tony Blair, Harry and Meghan and Michael Caine have never sounded more like themselves. This is a large book of mostly short pieces on a dizzying variety of topics. A greatest hits selection from the last decade or so of his journalistic output. In addition to the parodies there are many articles and profiles in which the man of a thousand voices speaks in his own. His own voice is amiable, warm and engagingly idiosyncratic. Brown is always fundamentally serious when being funny and very funny when being serious. He avoids the full-frontal attack favoured by many satirists in favour of a more slyly subversive approach. This deceptively gentle approach, for this reader at least, is funnier and makes for more effective satire. He has a keen eye for paradox and spotting parallels between the most unlikely subjects. He observes how Richard Dawkins and his acolytes have become evangelical atheists, as intolerant of heresy from the one true non-faith as any religious fundamentalist; and also how Keith Richards, for a certain generation, has come to embody values others once found in the Queen Mother: ‘a symbol of stability, the embodiment of easy living, a reminder, in these uncertain times, that some things never change’.And it’s not all debunking. He writes with perceptive and loving appreciation about figures as diverse as the Marx Brothers, the painter and poet David Jones, the playwright Simon Gray and the cartoonist Ronald Searle. Brown is quick to spot the bogus and pompously self-deluding but about those he regards as genuinely gifted he writes at times with a touching almost wide-eyed sense of wonder.A dipping into sort of book, I suppose, except Craig Brown is such entertaining company that, once I’d dipped into it, I found it extremely difficult to dip out again.