One on One
Author(s): Craig Brown
101 chance meetings, juxtaposing the famous and the infamous, the artistic and the philistine, the pompous and the comical, the snobbish and the vulgar, each 1,001 words long, and with a time span stretching from the 19th century to the 21st. Life is made up of individuals meeting one another. They speak, or don't speak. They get on, or don't get on. They make agreements, which they either hold to or ignore. They laugh, they cry, they are excited, they are indifferent, they share secrets, they say, "How do you do?" Often it is the most fleeting of meetings that, in the fullness of time, turn out to be the most noteworthy. 'One on One' examines the curious nature of different types of meeting, from the oddity of encounters with the Royal Family (who start giggling during a recital by TS Eliot) to those often perilous meetings between old and young (Mark Twain terrifying Rudyard Kipling) and between young and old (the 23-year-old Sarah Miles having her leg squeezed by the nonagenarian Bertrand Russell), to contemporary random encounters (George Galloway meeting Michael Barrymore on Celebrity Big Brother). Ingenious in its construction, witty in its narration, panoramic in its breadth, 'One on One' is a wholly original book.
Product Information
Praise for 'The Lost Diaries': 'The mix of belly laughter, common sense and the wildest whimsy makes it a prize example of the English sense of humour at its finest, and confirms Brown as the master of language and linguistic nuance, and our greatest living satirist' - Sunday Times 'The most screamingly funny living writer! The republication rights should be acquired by the Gideons who will have it placed in a drawer in every hotel room in the world', Five stars, - Barry Humphries, Mail on Sunday 'Inspired! a comic masterstroke' - Daily Telegraph 'On-the-money parodies! cumulatively they skewer the voices of these "writers" in a funny, uncanny way. A fine display of a master parodist' - Financial Times 'Pitch-perfect, laugh-out-loud parodies from our greatest living satirist' - Sunday Times, Must Reads 'The amazing Craig Brown - the greatest satirist since Max Beerbohm' - Elaine Showalter, Guardian '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 been writing the Private Eye celebrity diary since 1989. He has also written parodies for many other publications, including the Daily Telegraph, Vanity Fair, The Times and the Guardian.
General Fields
- :
- : HarperCollins Publishers
- : Fourth Estate Ltd
- : 0.69
- : 30 June 2011
- : 240mm X 159mm
- : United Kingdom
- : 01 December 2011
- : books
Special Fields
- : Craig Brown
- : Hardback
- : 2011
- : 302.346
- : 400