I've read Marina Hyde and her columns in The Guardian for its ridiculous skewering of what happens to be going on at the moment:an election, the runup to the Brexit referendum and its aftermath, British political shenanigans, you name it. I don't read all of her columns religiously but do enjoy the commentary, even if I do not always fully understand them as someone who is not British. This is a collection of those columns.

She covers a range of topics in her columns, not all to my taste. Quite a lot of politics, of course. Some sport, as she’s knowledgable about football in particular, which is also OK with me. But she also writes about ‘Showbiz’ sometimes and although I can see she’s trying to explain celebrity culture without glorifying it I confess to having skipped much of those chapters. Though the #Metoo review was good. Hyde received two awards from the Sports Journalists' Association (SJA) in February 2020, including Sports Journalist of the Year, the first woman to receive the award in its 43-year history. The other award was for Sports Columnist of the Year. She had written columns during the year on Prime Minister Theresa May’s decision to award a knighthood to Geoff Boycott, Tiger Woods’s performance at the 2019 Masters, and male responses to the FIFA Women's World Cup that year. [17] So much wrong with our politics, but the writer balances her critiques with wit and ridicule too. Ridicule is an excellent way to puncture the pompous. She’s quite good at throwing out phrases describing characters and events too. For example, the tendency of some of our privately schooled politicians to throw Latin phrases, or long anarchic words, into their mundane speeches led her to describe them as posing as the ‘classic stupid-person’s-idea-of-a-clever-person,..’. The class system has an inordinate influence on politics in the U.K. The state of affairs in which the vast majority of PMs (including Labour Party ones) have gone to Eton, then Oxford, is bizarre in the extreme to the rest of the world, but seems to be universally seen as OK across the pond. Apart from this, my main engagement with U.K. politics has been the several occasions when I've had to explain to people when they refer to my home city of Dublin as being 'part of the U.K. I haven't been to', or 'part of the U.K. I love', etc., that in fact, Dublin has been a part of the Republic of Ireland since we won the War of Independence in 1921. However, it has been fascinating to read the take of someone who contends with this system as a voter and journalist, and is also an extremely gifted satirist.

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A full state banquet of crazy: Marina Hyde’s Guardian column has been a reliable place to turn to for comic relief when the grotesque incompetence, chaos, sleaze and lies of our betters threaten to overwhelm. Arguably, a collection of journalistic hot takes on an unusually turbulent period in our history - this volume starts in 2019 and ends in the defenestration of Johnson - runs the risk of seeming horribly dated but we need this as a reminder, and a laugh out loud one at that, of all that has happened. What does she think this kind of column writing is for? “I’ve been able to make much more serious points since I started mostly trying to tell jokes. You can do quite a lot at the top, and then you can be a bit like a DJ, that needle scratch, a little serious bit at the bottom. I don’t think it changes anything, by the way, not for one second... But I do think it’s very comforting. I try to be a friend to the reader, to try and make them laugh, saying let’s be in a gang of ‘us’ laughing at ‘them’…. Swift was an amazing satirist, but what did A Modest Proposal change? Absolutely nothing.” No one was ever argued out of an opinion by a newspaper columnist - "opinion journalists" exist to provide a warm glow (and an incentive to renew subscriptions) in readers who share their opinions. That said, I happen to agree with Hyde on a lot of things, and even better, she's the pithiest, funniest columnist I know of currently operating in the UK or the US. I greatly enjoyed reading the book, partly because I agree with the author’s sentiments, partly for the style of writing and also because it was a sobering reminder of how the country has ended up in its present state.

An infinite number of gag-writers, working all day in a gag factory, couldn't come up with any of the perfectly-formed one-liners that populate Marina Hyde's hilarious writing . . . But behind the wit lurks real anger, argument, exasperation and intelligence. Her writing is more than a gentle poke in the it's a well-wrought and deftly aimed smash in the teeth.' This is an incredibly funny and scary and brilliant book. It's not going to please people with certain politics, but for those whose politics is even centre-ground, Marina Hyde's pithy way with words will have you laughing out loud. She grounds you. She gets to the core of an issue, peeling away all the rubbish and says, look at this! Seriously, look at this! Some of it is funny, some of it is painfully skewering, some of it is insightful, etc. If you're a fan of essay collections this might be a fun read. If you're someone who reads Hyde regularly or are looking for new material from here, this probably isn't the book for you and would be skippable. An infinite number of gag-writers, working all day in a gag factory, couldn't come up with any of the perfectly-formed one-liners that populate Marina Hyde's hilarious writing . . . But behind the wit lurks real anger, argument, exasperation and intelligence. Her writing is more than a gentle poke in the ribs: it's a well-wrought and deftly aimed smash in the teeth.'Secondly, I was a bit disappointed, initially, that Marina wasn’t reading it herself…however, the reader chosen, someone I haven’t encountered before, was more than up to the job. She, too, was brilliant, I thought. Hyde was “fascinated” by politics as a child, and initially wanted to pursue it as a career. So when she arrived at Oxford to study English in the late 1990s, she made a beeline for the Union. “Talk about 10th circle of hell,” she says. “It was so dreadful. In that moment, I had this terrible realization that, actually, real politics was like this. It was a horrendous scales falling from the eyes. This thing I’d wanted to do all my life I no longer wanted to do at all, because of the people.” Half of them, she notes, are now “probably in the cabinet.” She rarely writes about herself. But the week the story of Sarah Everard’s awful death broke, she was followed and verbally abused by a strange man as she was collecting one of her children. She decided to write about it because it was so commonplace. “The vogue 10 or 15 years ago was everybody writing first-person pieces about terrible things that have happened to them. I do so sparingly… I suppose it’s exposing, isn’t it? I’m really quite private, so I don’t like to do that. But I thought that there was a reason for it.” Surprisingly few ever complain though. But then, “it’s a terrible show of weakness to have read [the column]”, she says with a laugh. “Johnson always when I’ve seen him has gone –” she looks down and gruffly shakes her head. “I think that’s absolutely ridiculous. What he should really do is pretend that he’s never seen it at all.”

For those of us who devoured Greer’s Pulitzer-winning novel Less, this is an unexpected gift. The first instalment introduced us to the hapless, rather pathetic Arthur Less (if like me, you are allergic to cheap puns, rest assured; the obvious ground for word play is ploughed with wit and genuine pathos). Less is a novelist with ambition and mild success, desperately seeking fulfilment and peace of mind. Sadly, his relationship with his beloved Freddy, the frustrated narrator of this book, suffers under the auspices of his tendency to respond to character-testing life challenges by running away with all the nobility of Monty Python’s ironically named knight, the unheroic scaredy-cat Brave Sir Robin. Hyde has won awards for her journalism. In 2017 she was named Political Commentator of the Year at the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards, as well as winning the Commentariat of the Year Award. [18] At the 2018 Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards, she received the Commentator of the Year award. In 2019, she won Political Commentator of the Year at the National Press Awards. [19] Also in 2019, she received the Columnist of the Year award at the British Journalism Awards. [20] She won the same award again at the British Journalism Awards in 2020. [21] Also in 2020, she became the first woman ever to win the Sports Journalist of the Year award at the British Sports Journalism Awards. At the same event, she also won Sports Columnist of the Year. [17] In 2020 Hyde won the London Press Club's Edgar Wallace Award for writing or reporting of the highest quality. [22] Other work [ edit ] Greenslade, Roy (24 December 2011). "Caseby's squalid note to the Guardian editor shows News International's true face". The Guardian. By dying in April 2014 of a suspected heroin overdose, who knows how much entertaining copy Peaches Geldof deprived Hyde of? What about legal restrictions? “There’s almost always a way around… a way that means that the reader will understand exactly the same thing from [a joke], but somehow I am not going to court for it. I really try and get as close as possible to that line. It’s been my life’s work!” Verbally abusedMarina Hyde is a brilliantly funny satirist with an ingenius ability to describe this situation. Her intimate knowledge of the British political landscape makes the commentary reach a level of granularity that I honestly found a little tough going at times, but at other times hilarious. While Brexit was a regrettable thing to us Irish, for me, following its ins and outs that closely hasn't really been a priority. To those more familiar with the subject, these portions of the book may be more rewarding. Certain other articles rang stunningly true, such as 'Britons want a bit of drama from their leaders - and Keir Starmer isn't serving it'. It seems to be a truism that the nuttier the Prime Minister is as an ideologue, the longer they last in the U.K. There is of course one exception to this: Liz Truss. Hyde's book was published before her 'tenure', but I mean, Truss does at least have the distinction of overturning this rule of thumb. I am a huge fan of Marina Hyde's column in the Guardian. Her particular form of acerbic wit, the way she has of using such a wide frame of cultural references to illustrate her points, really appeal to me - as, I will admit up front, does her left-wing inclinations. She decided not to edit the articles in this collection, which spans the years from Brexit to the appointment of the first of a series of short-lived Tory PMs, taking in Trumpian politics, and dipping into Hollywood, moguls and the media by way of light relief.