Lining up for punishment

This stout paperback draws together 25 years of Craig Brown's best journalism and writing, from his fortnightly parodies for Private Eye to his daily columns, satires, clerihews and spoofs in just about every British newspaper. For some reason, the front cover has been designed to resemble a computer software manual, with a pattern of word-processor keys, which may lead dimmer bookshops to stock it in their information technology section. Let's hope not, because this brilliant, subversive collection deserves a much wider audience than computer geeks.

Fans of Craig Brown will find his cast of favourite targets reassembled for punishment: John Prescott, Jeffrey Archer, Nicholas Serota, Martin Amis, Clive James. There is a particularly acute parody of Tina Brown's editor's letters in the dying Talk magazine, a poignant spoof of Paddy Ashdown's diaries as he fails to sell electoral change to Tony Blair, and a hilarious take-off of the Woodrow Wyatt diaries (which explores the frontiers of double-parody, the original Wyatt diaries reading much like parody in the first place).

The striking thing about Craig Brown's best parodies are that, however hard you tried, you couldn't improve upon them: every word, every nuance is perfect, as he somehow manages to weave together the authentic tone of his victim with the surreal overlay of the parodist.

In an essay in the collection he explains how he sets about the task: first underlining telling phrases from his target's speeches or books, then "recopying them with a tweak here and a tweak there, rather in the manner of a drunken court stenographer".

The targets of his humour embrace politicians and newspaper editors, successful authors and rival columnists, arts and showbiz celebs. In Britain today, any worldly success is likely, in due course, to draw the attention and ridicule of Craig Brown. At this point, I should declare a special perspective. For five years at school, Craig was one of my best friends, and the parodies he was writing, aged 15, for the school magazine were astonishingly similar in quality and subject matter to his current output. A spoof he wrote on a new-boys' teaparty, in the style of a dozen authors including Harold Pinter and Enid Blyton, would have slotted naturally into this book.

In those days, however, Craig was still to resolve whether he preferred to parody the pretensions of the worldly, or actually be worldly himself. His (non-ironic) ambition in 1973 was to be the subject of Eamonn Andrew's This is Your Life.

He used to muse on whether he would become editor of The Sun or editor of The Times. At some point, he saw through these empty ambitions and devoted his life to mocking those who hadn't. On the strength of this collection, it was the right decision.

There is a lot more than parody to the book. A notably funny essay on why he hates being invited to dinner parties will certainly make the Browns' Suffolk neighbours think twice before asking them over.

His essay In Praise of Golf still makes me suspect he only took up this unlikely game as a conscious act of contrariness. There are excerpts from Craig's alter ego pseudonyms, the Right-wing old buffer Wallace Arnold and drippy harpy Bel Littlejohn, neither of which have ever struck me as nearly as enjoyable as the genuine Craig Brown.

There are also short, perceptive memoirs of Peter Cook and Mark Boxer, and a wonderful updated version of Auden's poem, The Night Train, under Railtrack management.