James Delingpole James Delingpole

I’m boring, I’m ugly and I can’t write

Actually, none of this is true of James Delingpole, but he wants to make it clear that he won't succumb to the English disease of bogus self-deprecation

issue 05 July 2003

My new book, Thinly Disguised Autobiography, is not just good. It’s absolutely bloody amazing. The drug scenes make Irvine Welsh look like Mary Poppins; the sex scenes are more realistic than the real thing; it’s the finest dissection of the English class system since Evelyn Waugh; the dialogue rocks; it’s funny and moving, pacy, and lyrical enough when it needs to be but never so purple that you get bogged down in descriptions of trees or furniture; it’s at least as wittily post-modern as Dave Eggers but without the cloying sentimentality; the squalid bits outfoul Martin Amis; it’s better edited than The Corrections; and the ending, when with sorrow you reach it, turns out to be so blindingly brilliant that you go, ‘Bugger me. That was a brilliant ending. I think I might just have to read James Delingpole’s thinly disguised autobiographical masterpiece all over again. And possibly again after that.

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