Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks: The Essential Alan Coren

A hilarious anthology of comic treasures written by Britain's "comic genius"—the former editor of Punch and beloved regular on BBC's Radio 4 ( The Times).   Alan Coren was one of contemporary Britain's most prolific humorists. Over his forty-year career, Coren wrote comic and satirical pieces for The New Yorker, The Times, Observer, Tatler, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, and Punch, and published more than twenty books including The Sanity Inspector, Golfing for Cats and The Collected Bulletins of Idi Amin. This anthology draws together the best of Coren's previously published material as well as never-before-published autobiographical material.   In these pages, you will find the queen at a loose end playing I-Spy, QPR fans arguing at the cheese counter, prank phone calls to Mao Tse-Tung, the Roman tax collector Glutinus Sinus dealing with the mud-caked Britons, Gatling guns, an Italian driving school, herons, hearing aids, hosepipe bans, talking parrots . . . Welcome to the wonderful world of the late, great Alan Coren!   "Truly funny." —Stephen Fry, actor, producer, director, and author of The Hippopotamus