Product Description

The iconoclast of her generation Julie Burchill - who started her infamous career aged 17 on the NME - has been thrilling and dismaying readers most recently in the Guardian on Saturday. Whether lampooning the cult of celebrity, old men who behave like young lads, two ex-husbands or the hypocrisy of New Labour and the middle classes, Britain's Worst Mother (a title bestowed on her by the Daily Mail) applies her idiosyncratic and dissecting wit to the world we think is around us. This is a collection of her Guardian columns from January 1998 through to December 2000, a period that has seen the Kosovan war, the decline and fall of the Dome, and the eventual election of a new American President. There is no other commentator who can turn received wisdom on its head like Burchill, whether it's applied to world events or to the latest media personality. And there is no other journalist who can combine such relentless insight, malice and warmth to deserving causes. She is one of the best columnists around - an antidote to the glut of confession columns that saturate the weekend papers - and this collection brings together the best of her writing.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #119842 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Spending a day with the collection of Julie Burchill's Guardian Columns 1998-2000 is like being in the company of your wittiest, meanest, friend: very funny, stimulating and provocative at first but mildly depressing if taken in extended doses. This is an ideal tube-ride kind of book best taken in small doses. What makes it worthwhile is that Burchill can make you laugh out loud or make you cringe at her brutal honesty, but however mean-spirited she gets she's a life-affirmer. For example, how do you know when you're old?

You know you're really old when your mouth starts looking like a cat's anus ... look at recent photos of Iggy Pop. See it? The body's still buff, but those lips: it's like there's a tiny man standing on his tongue sewing his mouth closed from the inside. Its sort of ruched, and sort of frilled, and altogether horrible.

As a social and political commentator she can be perceptive and wise one minute and a knee-jerk reactionary the next. But then one doesn't go, in the last resort, to Burchill for political leadership, one reads her columns to be stimulated, provoked and entertained and on this score she's still one of the best around. As Burchill herself said (on the subject of "Personality" columnists): "To open the Sunday papers is to be immediately transported to the World's Most Boring Dinner Party, to find yourself surrounded by well-groomed women with names that end in "a" and absolutely nothing to say while saying it very loudly." Burchill is easy to mock in her guise as champion of the working class, and sometimes tiring in her anti-male polemics, but love her or loathe her she is never, ever, boring. --Larry Brown

About the Author
Born in Bristol in 1959, Julie Burchill is known for her controversial and acerbic style of journalism. At seventeen, she went to work for the New Musical Express, at nineteen The Face, at twenty-four The Sunday Times. She has written for many magazines and national newspapers and is the author of eight previous books.

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Customer Reviews

Repetitive
When she is amusing it is just my sort of humour. When she is serious she is very serious though she does repeat the same old stuff over and over again.

Splendidly comforting
I really like Julie Burchill. She's one of the few people who are unashamed to write about things they know nothing of (she managed to write a novel about Prague without ever going there, she thinks Kafka is great even though she has never read him). But the thing I really like about these columns is that they show that over the past twenty odd years she has never changed. She still wants to be spikey and aggressive and comes out sounding like a sixteen-year old trying to be the greatest wit on the NME. It's so comforting when a writer doesn't try to surprise you with anything new. For people of my age she occupies a place along with Blue Peter and Terry Wogan, a fixed and familiar point. I hope she keeps on with her "unique brand of acid wit" for many decades to come. She will always have at least one loyal reader in me.

Incomparable
Julie likes: Brighton, her swimming pool, Kate Moss, Princess Diana, Massive Attack, the working class. Julie dislikes: Johns Lennon and Peel, France, Tony Parsons, misogyny and bulls*** in all forms. Julie is: opinionated to the nth degree, breathtakingly witty, superlatively talented, teeth grindingly annoying at times and at others makes you want to punch the air and shout 'Yay!' In words of one syllable: buy this book.