Haywire: The Best of Craig Brown

by Craig Brown

‘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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Humor, Essays

531 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 2, 2023

About the author

Craig Edward Moncrieff Brown (born 23 May 1957, Hayes, Middlesex) is a British critic and satirist from England, probably best known for his work in British magazine Private Eye.

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of articles, reviews, and other writings, from author Craig Brown's career. I have enjoyed everything I have read by Mr Brown so far, including, 'One on One,' and his two most recent successes, 'Ma'am Darling,' about Princess Margaret and 'One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time,' so I was looking forward to this.

The book is split into various headings: Fun and Games, Comedians, The Great and the Good, The Big Questions, Panics, History, Celebrity, Pop, Bad Hats, Royalty, Self-Help and Memory Lane. Much of the beginning starts out with muses on Covid, which now feels rather like ancient history. Personally, being rather unsociable and having my family there, I rather enjoyed lockdown and loved working from home, so I floundered a little there. Happily, though, once past that section, Brown concentrates on gently mocking those who seek the spotlight.

My favourite section was comedians, where there are perceptive and witty essays on Tommy Cooper, Arthur Lowe, Benny Hill, Peter Cook, Auberon Waugh, Les Dawon and Kenneth Williams. Other highlights for me was a review of Chips Channons Diaries (although I loved them personally) and a moving essay on the cartoonist Ronald Searle. Also, Brown's section on politicians, such as Tony Benn, Macmillian and a tragic series of tweets from a disgraced MP which leads you to feel sympathy for those times when we are all at our lowest.

In Pop, Brown tackles the feud between Tony Blackburn and John Peel, there are reviews of Bruce Springsteen and Keith Richards biographies and an essay on Brian Epstein, which I think was in the reissue of his biography. I am also a huge Beatles fan and have been for most of my ife and I did feel Mr Brown is too - not only because of his book on them, but he is fairly gentle when they are mentioned, keeping his sharp wit for others, lesser musicians - who are, basically, eveyone else.

Whatever you are interested in, you will find something to interest you in this volume, particularly if you are intested in popular culture in the twentieth century. This would be an ideal present for those who would enjoy something to dip into or read cover to cover, with much to delight and entertain and will doubtless lead the reader on to other books in order to read about those sections which interest them more deeply. Any book which leads you to another is well worth perusing and I am glad that I clambered over the section on Covid and read on.

[Truls Haugen Sletvold · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jeg har tidligere lest Craig Browns formidable kulturhistoriske murstein om Beatles «One, two, three, four - The Beatles in time», og ble glad da jeg så at hans murstein av samlede essays var tilgjengelig, på Storytel.

Dessverre er samlingen en god gammaldags «mixed bag» og ikke på den helt godt gjennomførte måten.

Brown skinner som ingen andre når han formidler entusiastisk om biografi -hans foretrukne sjanger, der han forøvrig har gjort store steg i å bringe originalitet - og mindre kjente figurer fra GB som han anmelder nyutgitte dagbøker til. Browns 50 minutter lange essay om politikeren «Chips» Channon gir et unikt innblikk i mellomkrigstidens sladder og kulturelle høybårenheter; mens Browns melankolske «Ode» til den britiske dramatikeren Simon Gray, runder av samlingen som en hyllest til livet, og litteraturen.

Dessverre trasker Brown alt for mye i barnebassenget når han skal være en stor «satiriker». Hans evner til å parodiere - oftest gjennom førsteperson «tweets» - markante personer i britisk kulturelite, forlater såvidt unnarennet og faller nokså pladask..

Vivian Westwood er jævla dum, Tony Blair er naiv og arrogant, Downton Abbey er langdrygt og melodramatisk, Jacob Rees Mogg er en priveligert drittunge. I korte trekk er Craig Browns satire for det meste konstateringer av et personlighetstrekk, der satirikeren Brown; istedenfor å sparke opp vidåpne dører, står vennlig og banker på den løse luften.

Flere av Browns essays som tar for seg det komiske elementet i at Keith Richards og Johnny Rotten har lagt på seg, virker allerede 5 år siden utgivelsen som lunken og nokså stakkarslig mobbing, fremfor den bitende satiren Brown er - tydeligvis, dog jeg aldri har lest det - blitt kjent for.

[F.R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read PRIVATE EYE magazine religiously for years, so was well aware of Craig Brown's parodies. Some of which are included here. But what really impressed me was the quality of the book reviews in this volume. He is a really insightful, witty and readable reviewer. Whether his subject is high-brow, or the autobiographies of disk-jockeys or glamour models.

[Michael Reilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Craig Brown's last three books have been spectacular.
"One on One" is a daisy chain of actual encounters between well-known 20th century personages, from Mark Twain meeting Helen Keller to Groucho Marx meeting T. S. Eliot. It is a brilliant idea brilliantly executed.
"Ma'am Darling, 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret" is the best bio of a modern royal. ".
"One, Two, Three, Four; The Beatles in Time" does a better job capturing the Beatles then the three volume tomes being pumped out by the "Beatles Experts".

Brown is a comic writer by trade. This is a collection of pieces from newspapers, magazines and random places. Brown has a very wide range of interests and style. The best way to give a sense of the book is to give a few highlights:

A short piece on tongue twisters triggered by his discovery that he had invented a new one, "An erratic racket". I can't say it three times fast.

"Lockdown Dreams" is a list of things during covid that you want, you'd settle for, and you get. For example, YOU WANT to look cool in a facemask, YOU'D SETTLE FOR looking happy in a face mask, YOU GET a sweaty forehead and your glasses all steamed up so you can't read the sell by date on the salad in Tesco.

Brown loves celebrity diaries. His reviews of them are usually funny and brutal. Vivienne Woodward is a fashion person. He describes her name dropping woke diaries; "Viviene's Woodwards' philosophy is that the rich are all destroying the planet, unless they are very glamorous and/or are her customers, in which case, they are saving it."

He can write serious pieces. One of the longest pieces in the book, "Nothing is Real; The Slippery Art of Biography", is a brilliant description of the impossibility of writing a complete biography of anyone. There are always contradictory stories. Every person is too complicated to be put in a book. The goal shouldn't be completeness. It should be giving an accurate sense of the subject by whatever way works. And the piece is chock full of great examples of the slipperiness of biography.

I am embarrassed to admit that I learned that I have the same odd reading habit as Oscar Wilde. We both tear a corner off of a page, magazine and newspapers for me, roll it into a ball and pop it into our mouths.

Katie Price is apparently a British model and media celebrity who is famous for being famous. She released four! volumes of autobiography by the time she was 36. Brown reviews all of them. It is hysterical.

A three page transcript on a debate about Brexit between Proffessor Dullard and Sue Blather is pure double talk gold.

Brown sprinkles in collections of clerihews, four lines, first line is a name, aabb rhymes. Like this;

Gordon Brown
Was inclined to frown
Though once an hour
He preferred to glower

or

Mick Jagger
Is prone to stagger
After an all-night bash
He becomes Slumping Jack Flash

Not every piece is a bashing. Bruce Springsteen's autobiography, "Born to Run", " makes the efforts of Patti Smith, Keith Richards and Bob Dylan seem buttoned-up and humdrum."

Some of the pieces get deep into the weeds of British politics and show biz. This is a collection from at least the last 25 years. It would have been helpful to have an indication of when and where each piece was first published.

This is a very smart and funny guy enjoying himself across a huge variety of topics. He is a talented stylist. He clearly takes pride in the rhythm and pace of each line. Read his last three books first, then revel in this one.

[Edward Champion · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's nothing worse than reading a critic who thinks he's a comedian. And Craig Brown -- a washed up Boomer, an often obnoxious husk of no real comedic distinction (unless you count the misogynistic rustlings within his boxers when he "takes on" the likes of Tina Brown and Katie Price; one reads these embarrassing essays with the unsettling vibe that Brown popped a few Cialis pills just before writing these needless drive-bys) -- is about as much of a "satirist" as I am a svelte pole dancer and hot yoga enthusiast who participates in triathlons and brisk wellness conferences on the weekend. Particularly egregious exemplars of Brown's "wit" include the endless (and completely unfunny) doggerel and Twitter dialogues that spackle this hideous volume like spotty mold collecting at the bottom of takeaway Chinese food that's been sitting in the fridge for three months. Craig Brown is living proof that if you're a talentless tosser connected with the right people, you too can be ushered out into the world with flautlent adulations from big names. In Brown's defense, he CAN be a passable critic -- particularly in relation to semi-obscure figures like Maurice Bowra. On the other hand, criticism is a relatively facile medium designed for talentless parasites who have nothing real to say. And I feel that commending Brown for practicing commonplace cerebration after reading a book is a bit like applauding an old man for getting out of bed at a decent early hour or having the decency to remember to take the tea kettle off the stove after he hears it's whistling. In short, this doddering and pedestrian "satirist" has been graded on the curve. And why? Do people actually fear this parvenu? That's the only funny takeaway.

[Robert Baird · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are two types of writing in the book- pure comedy and more serious reviews. I will admit that I skipped a lot of the comedy but loved the rest of the book.

[Lauren Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think at 36 I was too young for this book. Didn’t know who most of the subjects were 🤣

[Matt Whitby · Rating 3 out of 5]

When he's reviewing books then it's great, but when he's aiming for humour it's not. I'd have preferred two books and I could have chosen to not read one.

[Studvet · Rating 4 out of 5]

A 4.5. Most very good and interesting, often very funny, but a few duds. Luckily I am old enough to know many of who he is writing about.

[Matt Short · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25. Some really good essays and articles, but some less good filler

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Best of CBs essays. Some are too British, some just outdated, but most are funny and worth the read. Least favorite of Brown's books but still ok.

[Graham Power · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

Nevertheless, 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. His deceptively gentle manner, for this reader at least, makes for funnier and 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.