Product Description

Francis Wheen's comic portrait of one of the 20th century's great characters, Tom Driberg: wit, parliamentarian, serial cottager, alleged communist spy and friend to the Kray brothers. There are few people for whom marriage was so ill-suited yet well attended: at Tom Driberg's were cabinet ministers and mobsters, Betjeman and Waugh, but it was Osbert Lancaster who commemorated the sheeer extraordinairness of the occasion, and with it celebrated the social life of Driberg, and an era of Englishness now passed into history when the Brideshead generation sang the Red Flag.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #203384 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 452 pages

About the Author
Francis Wheen is the author of the bestselling biography Karl Marx, a Guardian columnist and a regular contributor to Private Eye. Like Driberg he was educated at a very English minor public school and has been a gossip columnist , to the anxiety of many.

Customer Reviews

Affectionate, irreverant and funny
The remarkable life of Tom Driberg is enlivened but not outshone by the warmth and wit of Francis Wheen's narrative. Never were subject and author better matched than in this affectionate biography - an absolute treasure trove of incident and adecdote about a Zeligesque figure who contrived to be present at practically every defining moment of 20th Century history, from the Bright Young Things of the 20s through the Spanish Civil War and the prototype New Labour of the 1950s. Dispassionate, irreverent and above all glowing with good humour. Certainly the best book I have read all year, and probably one of the funniest.

Good biography
The unpleasantness of the man is matched by the strength of the biography.