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Description
This is a collection of the best of 'Social Stereotypes', the colourful and hilarious portraits by Sue Macartney-Snape with razor-sharp texts by Victoria Mather that appear in the Saturday Telegraph each week. There is, it has to be said, a degree of snobbery about the caricatures - there's a definite edge to the ones which might be the serving classes, and a degree of indulgence to the - vast majority - of pleasantly eccentric middle-class types. But there is real wit to the pen portraits. Mather, seemingly effortlessly, captures the weird ways, social foibles and little battles of, for example, the wife of the party raconteur (adoring silence when out, complete silence at home) or the member of a gentleman's club (smoked salmon and nursery food - what else could a chap want?). In the precision there is humour (sometimes sharp, usually gently teasing), but there is also warmth and humanity and the occasional glimpse of sadness, which undercuts the whole range and shows genuine insight. These are all allied to the excellent sketches by Macartney-Snape (educated in Australia, what are we to make of that?), each deftly bringing to life the words opposite, although, rather surprisingly it is the pictures that are done first, and the words written to fit. A rather gushing foreword from Nicholas Coleridge perhaps makes some rather grand claims for these two in placing them alongside Hogarth in a great British tradition of humour (Joyce Grenfell would be closer to the mark), but there is no doubting that these are a charming comic diversion, and easily the best thing in the Telegraph of a weekend. |
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