Stranger than fiction

Asked to review this book, which I was told was about encounters between unlikely pairs of people, I assumed it would be on the lines of Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. Craig Brown is our premier parodist, the best since the incomparable Max. Might his chatting twosomes include Cleopatra and Janet Street-Porter? The Marquis de Sade and Mary Whitehouse? No one could do that better, I thought; and by the end of it I’d be writhing on the Axminster, to borrow a phrase from the late Alan Coren. I couldn’t wait to split my sides.

I was quite wrong. To my surprise, the book describes real encounters. Truth being stranger than fiction, many of them are every bit as bizarre as anything Brown could have invented, and some are as funny. He has clearly put in a lot of research, and whereas someone less diligent might have corralled 20 encounters, he offers us 101.