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In May 2007 Richard Littlejohn released his 'masterpiece' Littlejohn's Britain, in which he attempts to identify all of the ills debilitating modern Britain.
Now, we all know that you should never judge a book by its cover, but in this case, you really can.
The speed camera, overflowing dustbin and London Eye clearly denote the trivial and childish content of the book, whilst Littlejohn's confused expression precisely sums up the intellectual clarity of the book.
Understanding the intellectual capacity of the book's audience, it is also available as an audio CD.
The Blurb:
Richard Littlejohn describes his job as sitting at the back throwing bottles. His twice-weekly columns have become an essential fix for millions of readers of the Daily Mail and the Sun over the past two decades. In "Littlejohn's Britain" he takes aim at the Blair years, lampooning New Labour with polemic, pastiche, parody, satire and savage social commentary. His cast of characters - including Two Jags, the Wicked Witch, Captain Hook and the Mad Mullah of the Traffic Taliban - have become part of the fabric of the nation. "Littlejohn" ridicules the country Britain has become over the past ten years - the barmy bureaucracy, the surveillance state, the petty interference in our lives, the suffocating regulations, policeman and judges who think they're part of the social services, the insanities of the 'elf 'n' safety industry, which have created such idiocies as forcing revellers celebrating Guy Fawkes Night to watch a bonfire on a big screen. Littlejohn has a bloodhound's nose for cant, hypocrisy and lunacy and an unparalleled talent for pouring scorn on the arrogance of the powerful, while making his readers roar with laughter. It's all here, in hilarious detail. Read The "Secret Sex Diaries of David Blunkett", sing along to "Two Jags: The Musical", take a ride on Blair Force One, play The Immigration Game and fight the Battle of Trafalgar under modern 'elf 'n' safety guidelines.
The reviews:
Amazon readers:
The writing style, as usual, is dumbed down for Littlejohn's key fanbase. If you're a fan of racism, ignorance, intolerance, homophobia and columnists from a newspaper that supported Nazism then this is a book for you. For everyone else, they'd get more entertainment out of a teletubbies DVD and only flick through this in the book shop if you want to see what brain damage feels like.
Despite the fact that he writes exclusively despicable nonsense I think freedom of expression should allow him to continue to do so and he shouldn't be banned, you (as the buyer) on the other hand should really think about whether or not you want to buy this insipid tripe and perpetuate his bile.
I read the first 50 pages and felt sick. This is how the Nazis would have spread their message if they had lost the election.
If I could have given it less than 1 star I would have. What an idiot.
A truly awful, awful book. I tried my best but I had to give up half way through - so poorly written, horribly misinformed and sloppily executed. Littlejohn comes across as nothing more than a stereotypical Middle Englander, whose only purpose in life is to moan.
A stultifyingly ill-informed, unfeasibly bitter and repugnant excuse for a human being. There's money in fear - and Littlejohn's raking it in.
Ploughed through it over a weekend and found the style nasty and without any redeeming humour. Littlejohn writes in a style which reminds me of being in a back of a cab and having views forced on me by a middle-aged many with a shaved head and a football shirt on. The gripes and moaning from Littlejohn makes one feel 'whinged out' by page 5 and his literary abilities are nearer to Alf Garnett than serious social commentator.
Littlejohn's Britain is a poorly-structured book that isn't funny enough to be considered a competant satire, with rhetoric so childish that it can't be taken seriously. Fans of this genre would be better off buying a Clarkson book; even if you don't agree with his rhetoric, he is actually funny. Opponents really shouldn't take this drivel the slightest bit seriously.
Johann Hari:
Littlejohn's Britain doesn't exist. Literally. He spends much of the year writing from a gated mansion in Florida, and admitted in a recent column that, when he is in Britain, he rarely leaves the house. He is describing a country he sees only through the pages of the right-wing press and his self-reinforcing mailbag. The cumulative effect of poring through more than 300 pages of this isn't to make the reader feel angry, or indignant, or offended. It is to feel pity for a sad, lonely little man, howling at a world that exists only in his own pornographic imagination.
You couldn't make it up? Richard Littlejohn does - every time he writes.
Rod Liddle (Sunday Times):
Littlejohn has a penchant for the most woeful, clunking, meat-headed satire, within which the predictable targets are attacked in the most predictable manner. Such as Muslims, gypsies, homosexuals, women, speed cameras and town halls that wish to “ban Christmas”: “There’s no carol service, / In High Wycombe, Bucks, / The council’s decided, / That Silent Night sucks, / In Scotland, St Andrews, / Where Mars Bars they batter, / Our Mary’s a dipso, / And Christ’s a brown hatter.”
Oh, spare us, please, matey. There’s page after page of this sort of stuff, wholly free of insight and – worse – devoid of humour, unless you possess the IQ of a shrubbery. How would the second world war have turned out if modern diversity training had been in force? We’d have lost! We’d have given in! You couldn’t make it up!
Ben Summerskill (Guardian):
Littlejohn's once fearless narrative about what's wrong with Britain has become curiously selective. Fatcats don't rate a mention (but then the author is trousering a reported £900,000 a year); neither does the cant of inherited influence (might that displease paymaster Lord Rothermere?); no complaints about endless repeats on the licence-leeching BBC (but then a quarter of the book's chapters include lengthy 'Here's what I wrote at the time' passages).
And no mention whatsoever of the legions of teenage thugs who, presumably, cause every bit as much distress to Britain's pensioners as Gordon Brown's denounced raid on their life savings. (Let's pray that Richard's youthful conviction for brawling outside a Peterborough nightclub doesn't constrain what might otherwise be an understandable enthusiasm for the return of the birch.).... 'I could fill a whole book with this kind of nonsense,' Littlejohn reassures us cheerily on page 242, of 367. The prose might have tired, but he remains a man of his word.
Charlie Brooker:
is a book that absolutely can be judged by its cover, largely because its cover features the words "Richard Littlejohn". In fact, just for fun, let's review it by its cover. That seems fair. So, the full title is Littlejohn's Britain, which is spelled out in hideous red lettering with a thin white border, across two lines, spaced slightly too far apart, as though the designer were consciously emulating a cheap pizza delivery menu. It's so ugly, it seems almost deliberate - as though they made this section of the cover as offensive and nasty as possible in a desperate last-minute bid to distract attention from the large photograph of Richard Littlejohn that hovers below it.
A noble effort. But it doesn't work. I can't help noticing Littlejohn's picture, even when my eyes are looking elsewhere, because his face smells - or at any rate, I think it does. I can smell it in my brain. Even when it's just a photo. It smells like someone breaking wind in a pair of cheap nylon trousers while eating a scotch egg in a hot car passing the Tilsworth Golf and Conference Centre on the A5 outside Dunstable. But worse...
Weirdly, they've chosen not to include any of Littlejohn's other bugbears on the cover: there are no gays or asylum seekers here. Unless, perhaps, they're crushed beneath Littlejohn's feet. It's hard to tell from the preview image on Amazon. I mean, I'd go into a bookshop and examine it in closer detail, but then I'd get Littlejohn on my hands, and my fingers would have that scotch-egg- car-fart stink on them for the rest of the day
Amazon has used copies for sale from just 1p, should you wish to step into the mind of Littlejohn - but you have been warned.
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