Book description
Isn't it always the way? You wait ages for one purple flour-filled
condom and then three come along at once. Of course the correct
procedure for a chemical attack in the House of Commons would have
been for MPs to remain in the chamber and remove all items of
clothing. I'm not sure which is the more horrific vision; anthrax
all over
London
or Nicholas Soames slipping out of his Y-fronts while chatting to
a naked Ann Widdecombe.
Here at last is the third collection of John O'Farrell's immensely
popular Guardian columns - the final part of the trilogy in which he
discovers that Margaret Thatcher is actually his mother. Contained
within these covers are a hundred funny, satirical essays on subjects
as diverse as Man's ascent from the apes and the re-election of George
W. Bush. Plus there is a full account of O'Farrell's heroic but
slightly less successful attempt to capture his Tory home town for
socialism. He claims that identity fraud has got so bad that an
audacious impostor using the name A. L. Blair even managed to get
himself a Labour Party card by posing a left-wing champion of wealth
distribution and civil rights. He asks why a Blackberry isn't
compatible with an Apple. And find out why the Queen didn't go to her
own son's wedding; 'What happened to that other girl you were
seeing?' 'Mother, we got divorced and then she died in a car crash,
remember?' 'Well sometimes you have to work at these things dear...'
John O'Farrell is the bestselling author of three novels: The
Best A Man Can Get, This is Your Life and most recently May
Contain Nuts, a satire on the competitive madness of modern
parenthood, which he has just passed on to his ten-year-old daughter
because she really ought to be reading grown-up novels by now. He has
published two previous collections of columns, Global
Village Idiot and I Blame the Scapegoats, as well as
the political memoir Things Can Only Get
Better. He is the editor of Britain's most popular satirical
website NewsBiscuit and regularly appears on TV and radio on
programmes such as Have I Got News For You and Grumpy Old
Men. His work has been translated into over twenty languages,
although how the gags work in Norwegian is anyone's guess.
His new book, An Utterly Impartial History of Britain(or 2000
Years of Upper Class Idiots In Charge), is now available from Doubleday.
He lives in London with his wife and two children.
