How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

by Toby Young

Youngs's title implies he is a bit of a failure, but in fact it is his english self deprecating way of telling you that he is actually quite sucessful. After Oxford, Harvard and Cambridge, Young returns to America as Social Affairs editor of Vanity Fair. His comic misadventures - inviting a stripper on bring your daughter to work day for example - are genuinely quite amusing and entertaining.

His description of his fathers work is genuinely touching. Young's father coined the term meritocracy and had a large hand in the post war poliical consensus by among other things drafting the 1945 Labour manifesto, and Young has great admiration for his father.