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The Lost Diaries is a wide-ranging anthology of the world's greatest diarists, each of them channelled onto paper through the considerable psychic force that is Craig Brown.Arranged on a day-to-day basis, spread throughout an entire year, these diary extracts form a patchwork quilt of observation, reflection, contemplation and, above all, self-promotion. As the months unfold, different diarists offer their insights on the events that pass: John Prescott on going to Royal Ascot, Nigella Lawson on preparing Christmas lunch, W.G. Sebald on enjoying an ice lolly by the beach, Karl Lagerfeld on the need for an umbrella in Spring.Among over 200 diarists featured are Martin Amis, Jordan, Germaine Greer, The Duchess of Devonshire, President Barack Obama, Philip Roth, HM the Queen, Heather Mills McCartney, Victoria Beckham, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sir Cecil Beaton, John Prescott, Mohamed Fayed, Harold Pinter, Yoko Ono, Barbara Cartland, Jilly Cooper, Christopher Ricks, Jeremy Clarkson, Jeanette Winterson, Sylvia Plath, Keith Richards, Maya Angelou and Frank McCourt.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. The Lost Diaries is the first time all his greatest parodies have been gathered together in one book. Arranged day-by-day, full of invigorating and sometimes shocking juxtapositions, they constitute a treasure-trove, choc-a-bloc with all the fantasies and illusions of our times.

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The Lost Diaries

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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.

One on One

WINNER OF THE SOUTH BANK SKY ARTS LITERATURE AWARD 2018A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR • A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR • A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR • A DAILY MAIL BOOK OF THE YEAR‘A masterpiece’ Mail on Sunday‘I honked so loudly the man sitting next to me dropped his sandwich’ ObserverShe made John Lennon blush and Marlon Brando clam up. She cold-shouldered Princess Diana and humiliated Elizabeth Taylor.Andy Warhol photographed her. Jack Nicholson offered her cocaine. Gore Vidal revered her. John Fowles hoped to keep her as his sex-slave. Dudley Moore propositioned her. Francis Bacon heckled her. Peter Sellers was in love with her.For Pablo Picasso, she was the object of sexual fantasy. “If they knew what I had done in my dreams with your royal ladies” he confided to a friend, “they would take me to the Tower of London and chop off my head!”Princess Margaret aroused passion and indignation in equal measures. To her friends, she was witty and regal. To her enemies, she was rude and demanding.In her 1950’s heyday, she was seen as one of the most glamorous and desirable women in the world. By the time of her death, she had come to personify disappointment. One friend said he had never known an unhappier woman.The tale of Princess Margaret is pantomime as tragedy, and tragedy as pantomime. It is Cinderella in reverse: hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled.Combining interviews, parodies, dreams, parallel lives, diaries, announcements, lists, catalogues and essays, Ma’am Darling is a kaleidoscopic experiment in biography, and a witty meditation on fame and art, snobbery and deference, bohemia and high society.‘Brown has been our best parodist and satirist for decades now … Ma’am Darling is, as you would expect, very funny; also, full of quirky facts and genial footnotes. Brown has managed to ingest huge numbers of royal books and documents without losing either his judgment or his sanity. He adores the spectacle of human vanity’ Julian Barnes, Guardian