Book description
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 meetings with the Royal Family (who start giggling
during a recital by TS Eliot) to those often perilous meetings between
old and young (Gladstone terrifying the teenage Bertrand Russell) and
between young and old (the 23 year old Sarah Miles having her leg
squeezed by the nonagenarian Bertrand Russell), and our contemporary
random encounters on television (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. Praise for 'One on One':
'These wonderfully gossipy but penetratingly truthful accounts don't
always show human nature at its best or most compassionate. But those
who find gossip not only highly entertaining but also highly revealing
about the most complex thing we know of in nature- ourselves- will
relish One On One form the first chapter to the 101st' Sunday Times
'For those who know Brown as a parodist, this book will come as a
surprise. Though often very funny, it's a work of straight non-fiction
whose great virtue is not excess but restraint… A hugely enjoyable book
that looks with affection and melancholy on the whirring roundabouts of
history and celebrity, and reminds us that the paths to glory lead,
handshake by handshake, pratfall by pratfall, to the grave' Sam Leith, GUARDIAN
'The book describes real encounters. Truth being stranger than fiction,
many of them are every bit as bizarre as Brown could have invented, and
some are as funny… This is much more than a comedy book' SPECTATOR
'It is partly a huge karmic parlour game, partly a dance to the music
of chaos - and only the genius of Craig Brown could have produced it'
EVENING STANDARD
'Marvelously inventive and witty … it's hard to imagine anyone who
could do it better. He 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. You
couldn't wish for a finer exponent of this literary parlour game' MAIL
ON SUNDAY
