Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks by Alan Coren

Alan Coren was familiar to many from TV and radio panel shows up until his death in 2007. He was a very funny man in those, and he is a very funny man in this collection of his writing, taken first from (the now extinct) Punch magazine and later from newspaper articles. He is very well regarded now, as the book proves by having forewords for each decade of his writing by Melvyn Bragg, Victorian Wood, Clive James, A.A. Gill and Stephen Fry. Fry sneaks in a quote from a TV appearance – when asked, “What were Queen Anne’s last words?” Coren replied “Alas, with me dies a whole period in table legs”. The articles retain this sort of clever wit, but they’re also artfully constructed – there are parodies of everything from the Bible to A.A. Milne, as written by Hemingway, here. However, the pieces that imitate the speeches of dictator Idi Amin can come across as racist, though Coren was not. It’s a slightly queasy addition to what is otherwise a very readable collection of humorous writing. [Nat Smith]