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

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Drawn from her spectacularly funny Guardian columns, What Just Happened?! is a welcome blast of humour and sanity in a world where reality has become stranger than fiction.

What Just Happened?!: Dispatches From Turbulent Times What Just Happened?!: Dispatches From Turbulent Times

Furthermore, please never refer to any form of exercise or any exclusionary method of eating as ‘a philosophy’. Existentialism is a philosophy. Raw food is food that has not been heated above 40 degrees. Let that clear up any persistent muddling of the two.” The articles are well-written, but some of them are from quite a long time ago, so I had to keep looking things up to see what was being referred to. A full state banquet of crazy: Marina Hyde’s Guardian column has been a reliable place to turn to for comic relief when the grotesque incompetence, chaos, sleaze and lies of our betters threaten to overwhelm. Arguably, a collection of journalistic hot takes on an unusually turbulent period in our history - this volume starts in 2019 and ends in the defenestration of Johnson - runs the risk of seeming horribly dated but we need this as a reminder, and a laugh out loud one at that, of all that has happened. Ultimately, it's hard to see Branson as anything other than the classic 'billionaire philanthropist' (is there any other kind of billionaire?) who declines to accept that the public finances would be in rather better state if people like them contributed their fair share. Forgive me for repeating myself, but philanthropy starts with paying tax. With the best will inn the world, it isn't enough to imply the only reason you operate out of a tax haven is because you like the weather."If you're coming to Coles by car, why not take advantage of the 2 hours free parking at Sainsbury's Pioneer Square - just follow the signs for Pioneer Square as you drive into Bicester and park in the multi-storey car park above the supermarket. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. You don't need to shop in Sainsbury's to get the free parking! Where to Find Us So much wrong with our politics, but the writer balances her critiques with wit and ridicule too. Ridicule is an excellent way to puncture the pompous. She’s quite good at throwing out phrases describing characters and events too. For example, the tendency of some of our privately schooled politicians to throw Latin phrases, or long anarchic words, into their mundane speeches led her to describe them as posing as the ‘classic stupid-person’s-idea-of-a-clever-person,..’. June 2016: As for Boris, never forget that the only untruth the prime ministerial favourite-in-waiting corrected in the entire campaign was the Sunday Times misapprehension that he dyed his hair. If there could possibly be said to be a silver lining to the shit-shroud we’ve all had to wear over the past six years (Hyde’s book begins in 2016), it is the fact that desperate times make for extremely funny journalism. And as the many national crises deepen, and the situation worsens, and the Great British Car Crash becomes a six-lane pile-up, so Hyde’s imagination runs riot, her writing becomes wilder and more fantastic. Righteously angry, too. We've lived through a political maelstrom in the last few years. Brexit tore many families apart (we had to ban the top from my family WhatsApp) and what happened to the UK in the elections that followed was even more divisive. That my family are all still talking, still very close, is a minor miracle. Politics took centre stage for lots of people that never normally bother with it. We tuned in to live debates and votes. During the pandemic, we watched our 'leaders' every day on the tv putting it to us! And what I found bizarre about reading this collection which documents just how it all unrolled, is just how much I'd forgotten. It kept getting more and more bizarre. It's STILL getting more and more bizarre. Have we become normalised?

Times Make for Two New Collections Prove That Desperate Times Make for

By dying in April 2014 of a suspected heroin overdose, who knows how much entertaining copy Peaches Geldof deprived Hyde of?

Marina’s sharp insights and dry humour make her regular Guardian columns a must read highlight. I often find myself re-reading paragraphs in wonder - thinking how cleverly they have been constructed, so sharply cutting through to the point at hand. 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.’ Be it biography, history, nature writing or any other form of true story, non-fiction writing is often loaded with just as much suspense and character as the most exciting novel