Eccentric Lives: The Daily Telegraph Book of 21st Century Obituaries

(Hardback)

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Description

In the late 1980s the Daily Telegraph transformed the traditionally dry and stolid world of obituaries, ushering in a new way of writing about the dead that was vivid, gently subversive and richly comic. Telegraph obituaries became a byword for entertaining journalism, celebrated for their deadpan tone and sympathetic eye for human quirks and eccentricities. Here is a gallery of the most entertaining of these eccentric lives from the recent past, most of them never before published in book form. They amply demonstrate that in an age of committees and bureaucracy and increasing pressure to conform, eccentrics of all kinds have continued to thrive. From the oddball to the prophet, they have ploughed their own furrow. These miniature biographies are charming, funny, oft en moving, but always compulsively readable.

Reviews

"It's well worth dying, if one's obituary notice then appears in the Daily Telegraph. For Andrew M Brown has with flair and brilliance carried on Hugh Massingberd's pioneering idea, that what makes up a life, what's worth recording, aren't only distinguished deeds, public accolades, but absurdities, even calamity -- certainly silliness and sadness. In these pages the reader finds dandies, divines, sages, lovers, travellers, villains, neglected geniuses -- yet were they eccentrics What's on display are men and women with original minds. If they died in a world where the maverick was no longer trusted or wanted, at least they were born in an era when unorthodoxy was prized, something to be nurtured not shunned. Which is to say this book, funny and loving as it evidently is, already has classic status, historical importance, because the society in which its subjects flourished has rapidly vanished." - Roger Lewis, author, Seasonal Suicide Notes.

The papers cheeky, truth-dealing obits have inspired a cult readership. The books that collect them are oddly uplifting, better than edibles, to tuck into before bed. The latest Telegraph collection is titled Eccentric Lives. Its a book about oddballs and joy-hogs and the especially drunken and/or irascible, and it may be the best yet. The New York Times

Author Bio

Andrew M Brown was born in 1969 and has been obituaries editor at the Daily Telegraph for nine years. He wrote his first obituary, a stock or advance obit of the actor James Garner, more than 20 years ago. He previously edited the opinion pages of the Sunday Telegraph and has contributed to The Spectator, the Oldie and the Catholic Herald among many other publications. He is married with three children and lives in south London.