Malcolm Harris

What a splendid organ. Last night I devoured Dame Denise’s anthology of epistolary delights from cover to cover, chortling, chuckling and repeatedly becoming breathless with glee throughout its 270-odd (very odd) pages. It is a rare enough event for any publication to elicit bursts of laughter, but to do so at the turn of almost every page is a feat of Herculean proportions. It minded me of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell firing off similarly inventive and hilarious missives to various establishment figures and corporations in the 1960s. Dame Denise is the essence of why we are proud to be British and her noble work should be trumpeted throughout the land, perhaps on the sheets of a roll of Ringmaster or the gargantuan side of a restaurant dirigible. Brava!