Authorihews

A clerihew is a type of short comic poem in which the first line ends with a person’s name. This collection, by the historian Noel Malcolm, offers a special kind of clerihew, christened here an ‘authorihew’: the first line ends with the name of an author, while the last line ends with the title of one of his or her works. The writers treated here range from Hegel to Agatha Christie, from Dostoyevsky to Betjeman, from Lenin to Hemingway. And the comedy ranges from satire to absurdity to the sheer challenge of finding rhymes for unlikely names and titles. You do not need to be especially bookish to enjoy this collection. Indeed, the poems about some of these authors may save you the trouble of ever reading their works.