Quentin Letts - Böcker

'The inimitable Quentin Letts dares to say in a new book what we've all been secretly thinking' Mail on Sunday 'Fuming and chuckling by turns' Daily Telegraph'Underneath the jocularity of Letts's style is a lot of real anger' Roger Lewis, The Times Hands, face, space. Curfews. Don't drink. Bend your knees. Conform, obey, comply - surrender. British life has become infested by bossiness. Post Lockdown, Quentin Letts storms back with a vituperative howl against the 'bossocracy'. They tell us what to do, what to say, how to think. Letts gives them a prolonged, resonant raspberry. He names the guilty men and women: Dominic Cummings, Prof Neil Ferguson, that strutting self-polisher Nicola Sturgeon, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cressida Dick, Michael Gove, even the sainted Sir David Attenborough. Bang! They all take a barrel. And then there's publicity-prone plonker Matt Hancock posing for photographs while doing his 'Mr Fit' press-ups. Reasonable people have had enough of being bossed about. And when reasonable people stop respecting the law, society has a problem. 'Brilliantly critical, but always warm-hearted and fair' Rory Knight Bruce, The Field

Sunday Times bestselling author of 50 People Who Buggered up Britain, Quentin Letts, is back, his wit sharper than ever as he reveals the real pandemic plaguing society: the passive-aggressive finger-wagging of the managerial class, as they use the coronavirus to assert their control.

Jerusalem is ruled by rosemary-scented King Herod. By the bougainvillea in Deuteronomy Square, Reuben's tea stall keeps customers sweet with lemon koloochehs. Onesimus the greengrocer piles his polished pears and pineapples in ziggurats, blind harpist Tabitha captivates bachelor Pharisees, Roman sentries doze and the widower Simeon, beset by gout and befriended by a dog called Shlomo, watches the passing promenade. By day Simeon dodges bossy superintendent Kedar. By starlit night he contemplates lost loves and the visits of a bad-tempered angel.Quentin Letts's delightful tales bring first-century Jerusalem to quirky life and show how the prophet Simeon, whose Nunc Dimittis became one of the great canticles of Christendom, can help an ailing twenty-first-century Englishman come to terms with his fate.Nunc! is a gracious yet beautifully navigated meditation on life, love and death.

The 'Nunc Dimittis', set to music by composers from Tallis to Rachmaninov, is one of the great canticles of Christianity and is heard daily in Britain's cathedrals. It is based on ten verses in St Luke's Gospel. They relate the tale of Simeon, an old man who was told he would not die before he saw the Messiah. He waited and waited at the Temple in Jerusalem. At last he saw the infant Jesus. At that moment he cried, 'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word for mine eyes have seen thy salvation'. Simeon was at last able to surrender his life.Who was Simeon? Why did he wait? And how did the month-old Jesus escape King Herod's infamous massacre of the infants? The Bible does not say.Quentin Letts's quirky, affectionate Nunc! tries to put that right. It takes the reader to the occupied Jerusalem of Herod the Great, the puppet ruler whose Temple was a wonder of the ancient world. The action centres on Jerusalem's Deuteronomy Square where Simeon's old army friend Reuben runs a tea stall selling heavenly honey cakes and fig bread. We meet Bildad the beekeeper whose hive goes missing; grocer's boy Benjamin, owner of a mule and cart that might act as a getaway vehicle; the drawlingly subversive Zillah, whose political salon lends her influence; and Simeon's long-suffering landlady Noor. Deuteronomy Square's plucky regulars must endure not only the bawling of a power-mad Roman centurion, Lucilius, but also the more snivelly authoritarianism of Kedar, the city's clerk of works.

The Rev Tom Ross's quiet and semi-alcoholic life as chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons is about to be shattered. Pastor Petroc Stone of a central London, evangelical church gives sanctuary to a young man being chased by the police for making an anti-Islamic protest. Politicians rage about the Church of England giving a safe haven to a dangerous criminal and Islamists surround the church building, furious at the boy's insult.Meanwhile, the charismatic, white-maned Don of Doubt, Augustus Dymock, and his secular campaign, the Thought Foundation, are pressuring the Church to sell hundreds of its under-used places of worship.As the stories twist and flow together, Ross finds himself caught up in a world of bribes, violence and political spin and, at high personal cost, he must confront his demons. The Speaker's Wife mixes Westminster intrigue with searching depictions of an England which has neglected its beliefs. Laugh-aloud satire is mixed with moving passages about the human condition and even a fairytale love story.

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain, Quentin Letts, comes his blistering new book on how Britain's out-of-touch, illiberal elite fills its boots.'HILARIOUS' Daily Mail'With its vicious takedowns, Quentin Letts' laugh-out-loud Patronising Bastards will have the lefty-elite running scared' The SunNot since Marie Antoinette said 'Let them eat cake' have the peasants been so revolting. Western capitalism's elites are bemused: Brexit, Trump, and maybe more eruptions to follow. But their rulers were so good to them! Hillary Clinton called the ingrates 'a basket of deplorables', Bob Geldof flicked them a V sign, Tony Blair thought voters too thick to understand the question. Wigged judges stared down their legalistic noses at a surging, pongy populous.These people who know best, these snooterati with their faux-liberal ways, are the 'Patronising Bastards'. Their downfall is largely of their own making - their Sybaritic excesses, an obsession with political correctness, the prolonged rape of reason and rite. You'll find these self-indulgent show-ponys not just in politics and the cloistered old institutions but also in high fashion, football, among the clean-eating foodies and at the Baftas and Oscars, where celebritydom hires PR smoothies to massage reputations and mislead, distort, twist. Political columnist and bestselling author Quentin Letts identifies these condescending creeps and their networks, their methods and their dubious morals. Letts kebabs them like mutton. It's baaaahd. It's juicy.Richard Branson, Emma Thompson, Shami Chakrabarti, Jean-Claude Juncker and any head waiter who calls you 'young man' - this one's for you!

From the Sunday Times bestselling authorWhich fifty people made Britain the wreck she is? From ludicrous propagandist Alastair Campbell to the Luftwaffe's allies, the modernist architects, it's time to name the guilty.Quentin Letts sharpens his nib and stabs them where they deserve it, from TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh, the dumbed-down buffoon who put the 'h' in Aspidistra, to the perpetrators of the 'Credit Crunch'. Margaret Thatcher ruptured our national unity. The creators of EastEnders trashed our brand over high tea. Thus, he argues, are the people who made our country the ugly, scheming, cheating, beer-ridden bum of the Western world. Here are the fools and knaves and vulgarians who ripped down our British glories and imposed the tawdry and the trite. In a half century we have gone from end-of-Empire to descent-into-Hell.