Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks : The Essential Alan Coren

Edited and with a foreword by Giles Coren and Victoria Coren

In a prolific forty-year career, Alan Coren wrote over twenty books, many of which became bestsellers, including The Collected Bulletins of Idi Amin. He turned down an invitation from Amin to visit Uganda saying, ‘I’ll probably end up as a sandwich.’

This anthology, with introductions to each decade from Melvyn Bragg, Stephen Fry, A.A. Gill, Clive James and Victoria Wood, represents the very best work of Britain’s greatest modern humorist.

Praise for Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks:

‘Coren preferred to make the English language the hero. So generous a writer forms a conspiracy with the reader, as they both revel in the splendour of the tongue they speak. For as long as the spell lasts—and Coren could make it last for a thousand words at a time—the reader can almost persuade himself that he, too, knows how it’s done. But it’s a secret. Writers who convince you that you share their sense of humour are pulling a fast one. They are celestial con-men. Alan Coren was one of them. And one of the best.’

Clive James

'Coren was possessed of a dazzling intellect…Colleagues reeled from his spectacular creativeness.'

Daily Telegraph

'It was not only that he was consistently briliiantly funny, but above and beyond that, his humour burst with humanity and warmth.'

Radio 4

'Alan Coren was one of Britain's foremost humorists, finding the comedy of life all around him and rendering it, hilariously and compellingly, in polished and witty prose.'

The Times