What Just Happened?!: Dispatches from Turbulent Times (The Sunday Times Bestseller)

Product Information

She rarely writes about herself. But the week the story of Sarah Everard’s awful death broke, she was followed and verbally abused by a strange man as she was collecting one of her children. She decided to write about it because it was so commonplace. “The vogue 10 or 15 years ago was everybody writing first-person pieces about terrible things that have happened to them. I do so sparingly… I suppose it’s exposing, isn’t it? I’m really quite private, so I don’t like to do that. But I thought that there was a reason for it.” I am a huge fan of Marina Hyde's column in the Guardian. Her particular form of acerbic wit, the way she has of using such a wide frame of cultural references to illustrate her points, really appeal to me - as, I will admit up front, does her left-wing inclinations. She decided not to edit the articles in this collection, which spans the years from Brexit to the appointment of the first of a series of short-lived Tory PMs, taking in Trumpian politics, and dipping into Hollywood, moguls and the media by way of light relief.

For all the abject absurdity of 2022, so too is there much rage and terror. On the precipice of fuel poverty and looming recession, with a government mostly obsessed by its own machinations, how does Hyde stop the bleakness edging in?

An infinite number of gag-writers, working all day in a gag factory, couldn't come up with any of the perfectly-formed one-liners that populate Marina Hyde's hilarious writing . . . But behind the wit lurks real anger, argument, exasperation and intelligence. Her writing is more than a gentle poke in the ribs: it's a well-wrought and deftly aimed smash in the teeth.' She first found a groove, she thinks, writing about sport and then about celebrity in her Lost in Showbiz column. She still enjoys writing about celebrities. “When Mark Wahlberg revealed his daily routine, and I discover that he gets up at 2.30 in the morning and does four workouts a day.” She starts to laugh. “ To be ‘Mark Wahlberg’? Why are you killing yourself in the pursuit of being someone who stars in Daddy’s Home 2?” Hyde, Marina (27 April 2017). "Orlando Bloom's elf warning: 'Don't get on the wrong side of me' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 19 May 2017. Hyde, Marina (19 December 2008). "A peek at the diary of Elton John". The Guardian . Retrieved 14 October 2017. Weirdly, I discovered when going through the 47 trillion words I’ve written since 2016 that I often don’t even have a memory of writing half of them. It slightly felt like I had written a book I hadn’t read. A bit like Katie Price – only instead of not having even skimmed a single one of my seven autobiographies, I was completely in the dark about other stuff. Take the whole week of daily columns in March 2019, focusing on something called “indicative votes”. What in the name of sanity were they? I’ve heard of past-lives therapy; maybe I need past-columns therapy. Just as distinguished Hollywood crazy Shirley MacLaine is convinced she previously walked the earth as Charlemagne’s Moorish peasant lover, so I could be assured that I really did once, only last year, turn out 1,100 words on how Boris Johnson had literally swapped bodies with his dog. I mean, it sounds like something I might have done? And I don’t think I have an alibi for it?

For those of us who devoured Greer’s Pulitzer-winning novel Less, this is an unexpected gift. The first instalment introduced us to the hapless, rather pathetic Arthur Less (if like me, you are allergic to cheap puns, rest assured; the obvious ground for word play is ploughed with wit and genuine pathos). Less is a novelist with ambition and mild success, desperately seeking fulfilment and peace of mind. Sadly, his relationship with his beloved Freddy, the frustrated narrator of this book, suffers under the auspices of his tendency to respond to character-testing life challenges by running away with all the nobility of Monty Python’s ironically named knight, the unheroic scaredy-cat Brave Sir Robin. Not living in the UK, I am not ofay with a level of detail that I would likely need to appreciate, to have lived through, to get the most from this selected collection of Guardian thrice weekly articles written by the author. So whilst I can appreciate some superlative comedic writing, I know that I am in all likelihood missing a key element in truly appreciating the work to its fullest. Greenslade, Roy (24 December 2011). "Caseby's squalid note to the Guardian editor shows News International's true face". The Guardian. As settings go, it feels a little on-the-nose for a meeting with, arguably, the country’s foremost living satirist, one who—through Brexit, four Tory prime ministers, Trump, and a global pandemic, via narcissistic celebrities, evil billionaires, disgraced princes, and, of course, spineless politicians—has become the chief chronicler of our stranger-than-fiction times.Apart from that, if you agree with the author then it'll make you feel smug, which is probably the purpose for which you exist, and if you disagree with her then you can enjoy it on the level of irony.

What about legal restrictions? “There’s almost always a way around… a way that means that the reader will understand exactly the same thing from [a joke], but somehow I am not going to court for it. I really try and get as close as possible to that line. It’s been my life’s work!” Verbally abused June 2016: Nigel Farage is about to achieve everything he wants. That alone should make leavers think again. Though Geldof was annoying she was turning a corner and was on her way to becoming an interesting woman, but we will never know now what she might have become, will we? I wondered if this would work as an audio book. I had no doubt as to the content: Marina is a genius and a fair amount of the material was stuff I at least partly remembered from her columns over the past few years. But a collection of columns usually needs to be in ‘actual book’ form, and dipped into. But this totally worked as a continuous narrative…I don’t know how she did it, but it kept me hooked all the way through. Ponsford, Dominic (1 July 2013). " Sun 's outspoken managing editor Richard Caseby understood to be standing down". Press Gazette.Morgan, Piers (30 June 2012). The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade. Random House. ISBN 978-1-4464-9168-3.