Editing Christopher Booker (section)

==Career==

===Early life===
Booker was educated at [[Dragon School, Oxford|Dragon School]], [[Shrewsbury School]]<ref name="Grun">[https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/jul/04/christopher-booker-obituary Christopher Booker obituary] Published by The Guardian on 4 July 2019, retrieved on 12 July 2019</ref> and [[Corpus Christi College, Cambridge]], where he read History.<ref>{{Who's Who | title=BOOKER, Christopher John Penrice | id = U8078 | volume = 2019 | edition = online}}</ref>

===1960s===
With fellow [[Shrewsbury School|Salopians]] [[Richard Ingrams]] and [[Willie Rushton]] he founded ''[[Private Eye]]'' in 1961, and was its first editor. He was ousted by Ingrams in 1963. Returning in 1965, he remained a permanent member of the magazine's collaborative joke-writing team thereafter (with Ingrams, [[Barry Fantoni]] and current editor [[Ian Hislop]]) till his death.<ref>[https://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2019/07/03/43469/christopher_booker,_private_eye%e2%80%99s_first_editor,_dies_at_81 Christopher Booker, Private Eye's first editor, dies at 81] Published by Chortle and retrieved on 12 July 2019</ref>

Booker began writing jazz reviews for ''[[The Daily Telegraph]]'' while at university.<ref name="Tobitt">{{cite web |last1=Tobitt |first1=Charlotte |title=Private Eye founding editor and Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker dies aged 81 |url=https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/private-eye-founding-editor-and-telegraph-columnist-christopher-booker-dies-aged-81/ |website=Press Gazette |access-date=3 July 2019 |date=3 July 2019}}</ref> From 1961 to 1964, he wrote about jazz for ''[[The Sunday Telegraph]]'' as well. His contributions included a positive account of a concert given by the pianist [[Erroll Garner]], which did not happen; it was a late cancellation.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.thetimes.com/edition/register/christopher-booker-obituary-bpxfr7j3c|title=Christopher Booker obituary|work=[[The Times]]|date=4 July 2019|access-date=4 July 2019}} {{subscription required}}</ref> In 1962, he became the resident political scriptwriter on the [[BBC]] satire show ''[[That Was The Week That Was]]'', notably contributing sketches on Home Secretary [[Henry Brooke, Baron Brooke of Cumnor|Henry Brooke]] and Prime Minister Sir [[Alec Douglas-Home]] which have often been cited as examples of the programme's outspoken style.

From 1964 he became a ''[[The Spectator|Spectator]]'' columnist, writing on the press and TV, and in 1969 published ''The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties'', a highly critical analysis of the role played by fantasy in the political and social life of those decades. He was married to the novelist [[Emma Tennant]] between 1963 and 1968.

===1970s===
He married Christine Verity, his second wife, in 1972.<ref name="Grun"/> In the early 1970s, Booker campaigned against both the building of [[tower blocks]] and the wholesale redevelopment of Britain's cities according to the ideology of the [[Modern architecture|modernist]] movement. In 1973, he published ''Goodbye London'' (written with [[Candida Lycett Green]]), and, with Bennie Gray, was the IPC Campaigning Journalist of the Year. He made a documentary for the BBC in 1979 on modernist architecture, called ''City of Towers''. In the mid-1970s he contributed a regular quiz to [[Melvyn Bragg]]'s BBC literary programme ''Read All About It'', and he returned to ''The Spectator'' as a weekly contributor (1976–1981), when he also became a lead book-reviewer for ''The Sunday Telegraph''. In 1979, he married Valerie Patrick, his third wife, with whom he had two sons; they lived in [[Somerset]].<ref name="Grun"/>

===1980s===
In 1980, he published ''The Seventies: Portrait Of A Decade'', and covered the [[1980 Moscow Olympics|Moscow Olympics]] for the ''[[Daily Mail]]'', publishing ''The Games War: A Moscow Journal'' the following year. Between 1987 and 1990 he wrote ''The Daily Telegraph''{{'}}s ''The Way of the World'' column (a satirical column originated by [[Michael Wharton]]) as "Peter Simple II", and in 1990 swapped places with [[Auberon Waugh]], after mocking Waugh who firmly requested he should write the column instead of Booker, to become a weekly columnist on ''The Sunday Telegraph'', where he remained until March 2019.<ref name="Tobitt"/>

Between 1986 and 1990 he took part in a detailed investigation, chaired by Brigadier Tony Cowgill, of the charges that senior British politicians, including [[Harold Macmillan]], had been guilty of a serious [[war crime]] in handing over thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav prisoners to the Communists at the end of the [[Second World War|war]] in 1945. Their report, published in 1990, presented those events in a very different light, and Booker later published a lengthy analysis of the controversy in ''A Looking Glass Tragedy'' (1997).

===After 1990===
From 1992 he focused more on the role played in British life by bureaucratic regulation and the [[European Union]], forming a professional collaboration with [[Richard North (blogger)|Richard North]], and they subsequently co-authored a series of books, including ''The Mad Officials: How The Bureaucrats Are Strangling Britain'' (1994); ''The Castle of Lies'' (1996); ''The Great Deception'' (2003), a critical history of the European Union; and ''Scared To Death: From BSE To Global Warming, Why Scares Are Costing Us The Earth '' (2007), a study of the part played in Western society in recent decades by the 'scare phenomenon'.

In 2004, he published ''[[The Seven Basic Plots|The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories]]'', a [[Jungian]]-influenced analysis of stories and their psychological meaning, on which he had been working for over 30 years. The book was dismissed by [[Adam Mars-Jones]], who objected to Booker employing his generalisations about conventional plot structures prescriptively: "He sets up criteria for art, and ends up condemning ''[[Rigoletto]]'', ''[[The Cherry Orchard]]'', [[Richard Wagner|Wagner]], [[Marcel Proust|Proust]], [[James Joyce|Joyce]], [[Franz Kafka|Kafka]] and [[D.H. Lawrence|Lawrence]] – the list goes on – while praising ''[[Crocodile Dundee]]'', ''[[E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial|ET]]'' and ''[[Terminator 2]]''".<ref>Adam Mars-Jones [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/nov/21/fiction.features "Terminator 2 Good, The Odyssey Bad"], ''[[The Observer]]'', 21 November 2004, retrieved 1 September 2011.</ref>

[[Fay Weldon]] wrote "This is the most extraordinary, exhilarating book. It always seemed to me that 'the story' was God's way of giving meaning to crude creation. Booker now interprets the mind of God, and analyses not just the novel – which will never to me be quite the same again – but puts the narrative of contemporary human affairs into a new perspective. If it took its author a lifetime to write, one can only feel gratitude that he did it".<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-seven-basic-plots-9780826452092/ |title=The Seven Basic Plots |publisher=Bloomsbury |access-date=19 March 2013 |archive-date=9 September 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170909234609/https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-seven-basic-plots-9780826452092/ |url-status=dead }}</ref> [[Roger Scruton]] described it as a "brilliant summary of story-telling".<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/wagner-moralist-or-monster-1235 |title=Wagner: moralist or monster? |first=Roger |last=Scruton |author-link=Roger Scruton |publisher=The New Criterion |date=February 2005 |access-date=19 March 2013}}</ref>