To be truthful, we’re all lying through our teeth
THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION: FIRST DRAFT
by Guy Browning
(Atlantic £7.99 % £5.99)
DID Magna Carta die in vain? Eight hundred years on, we still don’t quite know what the legal foundations of our society may or may not be — so Guy Browning asked himself the question: ‘What does it mean to be British?’
His conclusion is that Britishness is not ethnicity or genetic background.
it has more to do with our complex ways of saying ‘mustn’t grumble’ and ‘can’t complain’ when disaster looms; being good at seething and tut-tutting when we witness terrible crimes such as queue-jumping; pretending to be religious to get our children into good schools; and owning an enormous flat-screen television if we are very poor.
THE THIRD QI BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE
by John Lloyd et al
(Faber £14.99 % £11.24)
PUB chatter must be of a very high order these days, especially if fuelled by books such as this, which feed the appetite for strange-but-true facts: squids have three hearts; kangaroos have three vaginas; Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, was a pencil-sharpener salesman; and an ancestor of television gardener Monty Don invented marmalade.
WOULD I LIE TO YOU?
by Peter Holmes et al
(Faber £14.99 % £11.24) WERE it not for non-stop fibs and evasions, civilisation would be impossible. We lie in order not to hurt other people’s tender feelings: ‘i’ll miss you’, ‘You don’t look your age’, ‘We really must have a drink sometime’, ‘What a beautiful baby!’
Tell the truth exclusively and we’d be at each other’s throats. We also lie to the doctor about how much we drink; we put little kisses on emails when we don’t feel any love or affection; and nobody in history has ‘read the terms and conditions’.
i loved the catalogue of men’s brags: ‘i was approached by Mi5 to be a secret agent’, and ‘i used to drive a Porsche, but i gave it to my ex and just kept the Fiesta’. This book of lies is horribly, brilliantly true.
THE BUMPER BOOK OF PEANUTS
by Charles Schulz
(Canongate £16.99 % £12.74)
FORGET Wittgenstein and Sartre, the great 20th- century philosopher was Snoopy. i always loved the twists and wisps of thought- ful observation: ‘ Someday, you’re going to have to grow up and face life without any help from anyone.’ The cartoons contain no adults — just a beagle or a little bird surrounded by slightly mournful, round-headed children.
The characters are always drawn sideways on, like an Egyptian frieze. it is an idyllic world of baseball, autumn leaves, fishing, pumpkins, security blankets and kites.
An anachronistic world, too — no drugs, stabbings, guns or sex. The children, in fact, are strangely middle-aged, yet their descendants are the foul-mouthed cartoon characters in South Park. The strongest language in Peanuts is Charlie Brown’s ‘Good grief!’
MAC’S YEAR 2015 by Stanley McMurtry, edited by Mark Bryant
(Spellbinding Media £9.99 % £7.49)
‘WE LIKE it when you put the corgis in,’ the Queen told Mac, when pinning the MBE medal on his lapel. i’ve met Mac, too, at a Richard littlejohn party. i was amazed.
in my younger days, i wrote for Punch magazine, and the cartoonists were a dishevelled, drunken mob, bitter because they weren’t considered proper artists.
Mac, by contrast, was urbane and dapper — and not only is he a proper artist, he can create a visual distillation of the day’s news that is superior to a thousand words of
anyone else’s prose. His skill is to depict Britain as it actually is — hospital waiting lists, kerfuffles about breastfeeding in public, government lunacies, fat ladies shouting at the sat-nav, people complaining about the police — and he plays this off against Britain as it should be still.
In Mac’s world, women have curlers in their hair, middle-aged men smoke pipes and civil servants wear bowler hats. There are jolly pubs and burly coppers on the beat. Mac is the successor to norman Thelwell.
FOR THE LOVE OF THE ARCHERS
by Beth Miller
(Summersdale £9.99 % £6.99)
THe archers, which began in 1951 when it was budgeted at £47 per episode (they can’t be spending much more than that now), has always belonged with Miss Marple’s rural scenes or John Betjeman’s poems about branch lines in the age of steam.
In reality, of course, it is a bunch of actors standing before a microphone in Birmingham. The sound effects are laughable — barnyard moos, gravel crunching underfoot, oven doors slamming shut and terrible yokel accents: ‘Well, me old pal, me old beauty!’
This is part of the appeal, like with the Carry on films. over the decades, we have had marriages, floods, foot-and-mouth outbreaks, cricket matches and Lynda Snell’s theatrical extravaganzas. Joe Grundy dropped his false teeth in the cider press and Princess Margaret appeared in person, as did Terry Wogan and Britt ekland. David archer, whom we are told in this veritable ‘bran tub of archers facts and figures’, failed his a-level maths twice and once shot a badger ‘in a fit of rage’.
DOG OWNERS: A SPOTTER’S GUIDE
by Robbie Guillory
(Freight Books £7.99 % £5.99)
THere are currently 8 million registered dog owners in Britain, up from 5 million in 1970.
as it is perfectly obvious that dogs own their owners, rather than the other way around, here is an amusing and perceptive guide to the myriad breeds we see on the streets and in the park, where everyone is ‘flustered, with crimson cheeks from constant whistling, running and abject embarrassment’.
owners of red setters, for example, are ‘intelligent and keen, with a strong will to please, the result of a youth spent at boarding school’. Sausage dogs in little quilted coats are always accompanied by the elderly, ‘placid, flaccid and hard to rouse’.
obese folk, moving with ‘a relentless waddle’, are often surrounded by slobbering boxers, both man and beast breathing wheezily and sweating profusely. Posh women and their spaniels ‘ go tweedy in old age’. The line drawings by Judith Hastie are excellent.