Craig Brown Books in Order

Collected by Lesley Cunliffe, Craig Brown and Jon Connell, these literary extracts explore the suggestive and erotic side of writing. Selections from classical authors through the twentieth century bring together changing styles of innuendo, desire and sexual frankness.

Craig Brown and Lesley Cunliffe assemble lists of facts and curiosities about Britain’s royal family. Unusual habits, personal interests, ceremonial encounters and memorable incidents offer a view of royal lives beyond the familiar sequence of reigns and titles.

More than two hundred lists explore the sporting world’s records, personalities and peculiarities. Alongside achievements and famous competitors, the book gathers unusual fan letters, premature celebrations, scandals and other details from the lives of athletes and spectators.

Publisher Sir Harvey Marlowe exchanges letters with his former schoolmaster Gerald Marsh about literature, manners and their busy lives. Their friendship faces an awkward test as Marsh pursues a sprawling book and Marlowe develops an interest in his wife.

Fictional broadcaster Wallace Arnold recalls his supposed adventures among politicians, writers, and high society. Through improbable reminiscences and self-important anecdotes, Craig Brown parodies public life, cultural pretension, and the people who insist they were always at its center.

This collection gathers Craig Brown’s Private Eye parodies of politicians, writers, entertainers and other public figures. Familiar voices and reputations become comic material as he turns his attention to people including Martin Amis, Jeanette Winterson and Damien Hirst.

Writing as the fictional columnist Bel Littlejohn, Craig Brown satirizes public displays of emotion and the culture of New Britain. Personal advice and supposed autobiography mingle with extravagant responses to royal news, political personalities and everyday troubles.

Craig Brown gathers two decades of his newspaper and magazine writing alongside new material. Parody, satire, and absurdity turn the habits of celebrities, politicians, artists, and the British media into a portrait of public life and its pretensions.

Craig Brown retells modern British history through distorted memories, mistaken identities and absurd wordplay. Moving from the First World War to the Millennium Dome, the spoof history turns political leaders, cultural fashions and imperial decline into comic confusion.

Craig Brown revisits Britain during Tony Blair’s years in power through satire and parody. Politics, celebrity, social fashions, and changing national habits become the subjects of a comic account of the hopes and disappointments surrounding New Labour.

Imagined diary entries give politicians, writers, celebrities, and royalty a chance to reveal rather more than they intend. Arranged across a calendar year, Craig Brown’s parodies contrast their public images with exaggerated private anxieties, vanity, and self-importance.

A chain of 101 true encounters links artists, politicians, royalty, and entertainers across unexpected divides. Each meeting leads to the next, revealing how famous people delighted, irritated, misunderstood, or surprised one another away from their familiar public roles.

Princess Margaret’s life emerges through encounters, anecdotes, and conflicting impressions from those around her. Craig Brown combines humor and sadness to examine royal privilege, frustrated ambition, celebrity, and the uneasy relationship between bohemian society and inherited status.

Craig Brown assembles essays, parodies, verse, and comic observations about contemporary culture. Politicians, celebrities, literary figures, and everyday fashions become subjects for a collection that moves between absurd invention and sharply observed accounts of public vanity.

Queen Elizabeth II’s life and public presence are explored through biography, cultural history, anecdotes, and satire. Craig Brown considers how encounters with the monarch exposed others’ hopes and anxieties, and how her image occupied Britain’s imagination for decades.

Craig Brown approaches the Beatles through a mosaic of episodes, recollections, and cultural detours. Rather than following a conventional band biography, he examines their lives and the extraordinary effects their music and celebrity had on others.