Haywire

The Best of Craig Brown

By: Craig Brown

Narrated by: Jan Ravens, 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.

Critic 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

Fine variety and good performances

It’s always a good sign when you laugh out loud listening to an audiobook. And I had the good fortune of laughing out loud many times even in public spaces.