Haywire

This volume brings together, for the first time, a selection of Craig Brown's finest pieces, drawn from the writer of Ma'am Darling and One Two Three Four. Its opening pages pose a run of absurd questions, such as the middle name of James Bond and how Jacob Rees-Mogg's nanny goes about getting him ready each morning, and the answers take the form of sketches, mock reference entries and short essays.

The collection mixes spoofed domestic advice from Mary Berry with supposed admissions from figures ranging from Queen Elizabeth I to Oprah Winfrey, the latter touching on her mother's beheading. Elsewhere, a Piers Morgan introduction of Kim Jong-Un is presented in all its overheated glory, and a discovery in an online historical archive reveals that the wheel, invented in Mesopotamia around 4000 BC, was poorly received on social media.

Brown also traces unlikely connections, including the effect of Blackpool on Sigmund Freud and Les Dawson. The longer essays turn their attention to a broad cast of people, among them Ronald Searle, John Stonehouse, Bruce Springsteen, Richard Dawkins, Katie Price, Stanley Spencer, Harry and Meghan, Brian Epstein, Kenneth Williams, Ronald Reagan, Simon Dee and the Marx Brothers.

Across these pieces Brown draws on the full range of comic forms, including clerihews, tongue-twisters, parody, farce, satire, social observation and nonsense, to puncture the fashions and self-deceptions of the present day. The book is written by the biographer of Princess Margaret and The Beatles.