James Delingpole James Delingpole

Ideas received or rejected

Until I read his enthralling account of what it’s like to be a middle-class sixtysomething crack addict, I’d never quite appreciated the genius of William Donaldson. I know his Henry Root letters are supposed to be very satirical but I found them a bit hard going myself — like a complex in-joke that you really need to have been somewhere weird like Harrow to understand. Initially, I felt the same way about I’m Leaving You Simon, You Disgust Me. Like Root, it’s sure to be found in every middle-class downstairs loo everywhere by the time Christmas is over, but on my first flick-through it seemed to me to fail in its most important duty: casual browsability.

It purports to be a dictionary of received ideas and sometimes you stumble upon a definition of truly staggering aptitude — e.g. ‘Beckham, David. Attention-seeking football player admired by children for the accuracy of his corner kicks’; ‘Georgian Town Houses. They don’t come cheap’; ‘Black Men. Always a surprise to hear them speaking French.’ The big problem is, though, that these nuggets of brilliance threaten to be overwhelmed by the swathes of dialogue in between.

Much of it is spoken in an Islington tapas bar by Simon and Vernon, a couple of pedantic, boorish know-alls given to stock phrases like ‘guilty as charged’, ‘we’re none of us getting any younger’ and ‘don’t want the world and his wife beating a path to the door.’ Now I know such people exist in popular mythology but I’m not sure that I’ve ever actually met one. And if I have, I certainly haven’t been sufficiently annoyed by them to want to read a book in which their dubious eternal verities and facetious asides are satirised at such length.

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