Satire, naturally, is in the eye of the beholder: the literary world, consequently, is full of satirists who made the fatal mistake of failing to take their audiences with them. One of the funniest (and also one of the most depressing) moments in Malcolm Bradbury’s Stepping Westward (1966), set in an American university in the shadow of the Rockies, comes when its visiting English creative-writing professor, James Walker, decides to whisk his class through Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729). Swift’s mocking solution to the problem of Irish famine is for the Hibernian poor to sell their children to be eaten by the rich. To a man, or woman, Walker’s pupils are either puzzled or outraged. It is left to the class anarchist to suggest that maybe we should re-evaluate our attitudes to cannibalism.

The English writer Craig Brown, described by Elaine Showalter as “the greatest satirist since Max Beerbohm,” labors under a solitary misfortune: he happens to be writing at a time when there is no clear agreement as to what is meant by “satire” and when large numbers of people wouldn’t know what it was if it fell on their heads out of a tree. Time and again, browsing through this bumper selection of his work, titled Haywire, I found myself wondering what would happen if a fan of the celebrated atheist Professor Richard Dawkins or the former glamour model Katie Price were invited to read Brown’s parody of the former’s self-regarding conversazioni or the