House of Fun by Simon Hoggart – review

A fitting salute to the Guardian's late parliamentary sketch writerI thought it unnecessary, and perhaps ethically dubious, to cover this book when its first edition came out in 2012; but now, following Simon Hoggart's death earlier this month, and the addition of a selection from a year's worth of parliamentary sketches from 2013, I think a salute is in order.For those of you new to this paper, Hoggart was, among other things, the Guardian's parliamentary sketch writer for 20 years, and this is a selection of his columns from 1993 to 2013. It is good that they have been reprinted in book form: I suspect that one of the casualties of the shift from print to digital versions of a newspaper is that columns such as parliamentary sketches can get overlooked by the casual browser.Hoggart's pieces could, in making politicians look ridiculous, be mistaken for frivolous exercises in name-calling, but they actually had deep foundations. He'd been a parliamentary correspondent in the 1970s, doing the kind of legwork that involved 5am sessions in the Tory whips' office that ended only "when blue curaçao was the only fluid left in the drinks cabinet".The important point to retrieve from this, which comes in his introduction, is that while Hoggart's sketches delighted because they seemed to have been composed by someone no more intimate with the world of parliament than any of us – and therefore as baffled, amused or appalled by its conventions, or ideas of acceptable language and... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2014-01-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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House of Fun by Simon Hoggart – review

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[ The Guardian | 2014-01-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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