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The Spectator Book of Wit, Humour and Mischief

Hardcover / ISBN-13: 9781408707432

Price: £18.99

ON SALE: 25th August 2016

Genre: Lifestyle, Sport & Leisure / Humour

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Approaching its 200th birthday in the rudest of health, the Spectator is known for the quality of its writing and the deep eccentricity of some of its writers. Given the freedom to say what they want, they take that freedom and more, and the result is original, provocative, often very funny, sometimes plain wrong.

From Jeffrey Bernard’s reports from the Soho frontline and Auberon Waugh fulminating about hamburger gases in the early 1990s, we encounter in turn the wild stream of consciousness of Deborah Ross’s restaurant reviews, the pinpoint etiquette advice of Mary Killen, Rod Liddle’s frothing but elegantly sculpted outrage and the magazine’s secret weapon, low life adventurer Jeremy Clarke. This bumper selection, which also includes eminent diarists, mad letter-writers and Boris Johnson, amounts to a masterclass in comic writing, lovingly compiled and edited by Marcus Berkmann, who still can’t believe he wrote a monthly pop column for the magazine for twenty-eight years without being fired.

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Reviews

A treasure trove to mine for one's own conversational repertoire
Mary Killen
This gloriously entertaining volume draws together the wittiest writing from the Spectator magazine from 1990 to 2014
Daily Mail