[The Americans] had seen the Englishmen in the War, whistling dirty songs at the Japanese, escaping in guffawing droves from cretinous camp-commandants, knocking back bitter in the mess before going out with a boyish toss of the head to paste Jerry over Kent, while all the world wondered. Americans had gaped at the Miniver set, picking shrapnel out of their tea and fussing over the Young Conservatives’ Picnic.

As so often with Coren, there are ‘in’ jokes here, aimed specifically at a Punch readership. You need to have seen Alec Guinness leading his Colonel Bogey-whistling troops in The Bridge on the River Kwai. You need to know the rude words grafted on to that tune by British soldiers, ending ‘and poor old Goebbels has no balls at all’. You need to have seen Greer Garson in the 1942 film, Mrs Miniver.

Coren plays many tunes on the xenophone, sometimes striking a wrong note. In ‘Mao, He’s Making Eyes at Me’, he has a Chinese say ‘Ah, so’ — the phrase always assigned to Japanese in sit-coms. Some of the humour would be proscribed as racist today, but Giles and Victoria just get away with reprinting ‘The Gollies Karamazov’ because Coren is blending Dostoevsky and Blyton in a parody provoked by a publisher’s statement that ‘every leading author has at least one children’s book in him’. ‘Every leading author?’ he asks. The editors agonised a bit, too, as to whether to include some of Coren’s monologues of Amin. I am glad they have done. Coren was not mocking the Ugandan tyrant because he was black; he was mocking him for his vainglory and his mangling of the English language; John Prescott gets the same treatment from Craig Brown nowadays. Here is Coren’s Amin:

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