Craig Edward Moncrieff Brown
(born 23 May 1957,
Hayes
, Middlesex
) is a British
artist, critic, satirist, and writer from
England
, probably best known for his work in Private Eye
.
Biography
Brown was
educated at Eton
and Bristol
University
and then became a freelance journalist in London
,
contributing to The Tatler,
The Spectator, The Times Literary
Supplement, Literary
Review, the Evening
Standard (as a regular columnist), The Times (notably as parliamentary
sketchwriter; these columns were compiled into a book called A
Life Inside) and The
Sunday Times (as TV and restaurant critic). He
later continued his restaurant column in
The Sunday Telegraph and has
contributed a weekly book review to
The Mail on Sunday.
He created the characters of
Bel Littlejohn, an
ultra-trendy
New Labour-type, in
The Guardian, and
Wallace
Arnold, an extremely reactionary
conservative, in
The Independent on Sunday. In
2001, he took over
Auberon Waugh's
"Way of the World" in
The Daily
Telegraph following Waugh's death. He lost that column in
December 2008.
However, he is probably best known for his
Diary in the fortnightly satirical magazine Private Eye, in which he adopts the persona of a celebrity
or other public figure. His targets have included
the Queen,
Jackie Collins,
Bill
Clinton,
Martin Amis,
Harold Pinter (numerous times) and the
publicist
Max Clifford. A typical
reference, characteristically combining viciousness and honesty in
the Diary came in the purported entry for
Mary Archer, married to convicted perjurer
Jeffrey Archer, "I am the chairman of
the Ethics Committee at Addenbrookes hospital, and well used to
coming down hard on those who lie incompetently." Another typical
Eye Diary mocks
Martin Amis's
pretensions - "Why pray, is it necessary to point out at this
post-millennial juncture that Iosef Stalin is no mate of this
52-year-old novelist? Why, indeed?".
Brown also writes comedy shows such as
Norman Ormal for TV (in which he appeared
as a returning officer), and his radio show
This Is Craig
Brown was broadcast on
BBC Radio 4
in 2004. It featured comics
Rory
Bremner and
Harry Enfield and
other media personalities. He has appeared on television as a
critic on BBC2's
Late Review as
well as in documentaries such a
Russell
Davies's life of
Ronald
Searle.
His book
1966 and All
That takes its title, and some other elements, from
1066 and All That. A
BBC Radio 4 adaptation followed in September
2006, in similar vein to
This Is Craig Brown.
The Tony
Years is a comic overview of the years of
Tony Blair's government, published in paperback
by Ebury Press in June 2007.Brown's niece is Florence Welch of
Florence and the Machine
fame.
Bibliography
- 1984 - The Marsh-Marlowe Letters: The Correspondence of
Gerald Marsh and Sir Harvey Marlowe: Volume One, 1983,
"edited" by Craig Brown (Heinemann, ISBN 0-434-08885-4)
- 1993 - Craig Brown's Greatest Hits (Century, ISBN
0-7126-5783-5)
- 1994 - The Hounding of John Thomas, a sequel to
Lady Chatterley's
Lover (Century, ISBN 0-7126-5778-9)
- 1998 - Hug Me While I Weep for I Weep for the World,
by "Bel Littlejohn" (Little, Brown, ISBN 0-316-64716-0)
- 1998 - The Little Book of Chaos (Time Warner, ISBN
0-7515-2657-6)
- 1999 - The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery by
Kyril Bonfiglioli, completed by
Craig Brown (Black Spring Press, ISBN 0-948238-24-0)
- 2003 - This Is Craig
Brown (Ebury Press, ISBN 0-09-188807-7)
- 2004 - Craig Brown's 'Imaginary Friends': The Collected
Parodies 2000-2004 (Private Eye, ISBN 1-901784-37-1)
- 2005 - 1966 and All That (Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN
0-340-89711-2)
- 2006 - The Tony Years
(Ebury Press, ISBN 0-09-190969-4, paperback ISBN
9780091909703)
References
- Craig Brown (II)
- Florence and the Machine interview: sound and
vision The Telegraph 4 June, 2009
External links
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