Approaching its 200th birthday in the rudest of health, the Spectator is known for the quality of its writing and the deep eccentricity of some of its writers. Given the freedom to say what they want, they take that freedom and more, and the result is original, provocative, often very funny, sometimes plain wrong. From Jeffrey Bernard's reports from the Soho frontline and Auberon Waugh fulminating about hamburger gases in the early 1990s, we encounter in turn the wild stream of consciousness of Deborah Ross's restaurant reviews, the pinpoint etiquette advice of Mary Killen, Rod Liddle's frothing but elegantly sculpted outrage and the magazine's secret weapon, low life adventurer Jeremy Clarke. This bumper selection, which also includes eminent diarists, mad letter-writers and Boris Johnson, amounts to a masterclass in comic writing, lovingly compiled and edited by Marcus Berkmann, who still can't believe he wrote a monthly pop column for the magazine for twenty-eight years without being fired.

Marcus Berkmann has been a freelance writer since 1988, working for newspapers and magazines and occasionally writing a book, like this one. He reckons to have written literally millions of words in that time, several of them in the right order. This, his 13th or possibly 14th book, is about those years of writing: the triumphs (few), the heartbreaks (many), the sackings (more than you would expect), the biscuits (many, many more than you would expect). In it he somehow makes the act of staring out of a window wondering what to say next seem both fascinating and, in some strange way, enviable, whereas, like most writers, he rarely leaves the house other than to go to the pub or the off-licence. Often asked how you become a writer, his advice remains: Please do not. There's already enough competition out there and we don't need any more. His advance for this book was about enough to buy a packet of Jaffa Cakes.