News & Blog by Milton Crawford

Read the latest news and bulletins, essays, features, opinions from our bestselling authors. Find out what's being said, debated, and discussed in the world of books and ideas.

Dec 24

A FANTASTIC STOCKING FILLER

by Milton Crawford on 24 December 2010

Ten reasons why The Hungover Cookbook makes a fantastic (adult) stocking filler this Christmas: 1.  Booze and Christmas go together like Santa Claus and Reindeer. This also means that hangovers come along for the ride too (there’s a downside to reindeer too: they create a lot of shit, but no-one ever mentions that). It means that this gift will be put to immediate practical use (always gratifying...

Dec 23

THE ENGLISH BREAKFAST TORTILLA

by Milton Crawford on 23 December 2010

This is one of my favourite recipes – a truly hearty breakfast for when you’re in a mood to eat and eat. It’s pretty much exactly what it says it is: the essential ingredients of an English breakfast cooked in a single pan which ends up resembling a Spanish tortilla (but full of fun bits). This is how to cook it: Ingredients (for 2 people) Olive oil 4 outdoor-bred pork chipolata sausages,...

It would be quite easy, writing a book about hangovers and inevitably having to be hungover in order to do so, to create a chaotic book that had no structure and made no sense at all. How fortunate I was, then, to have comic novelist P. G. Wodehouse’s decisive statement on the classification of hangovers to help me. Wodehouse wrote in his 1940 Jeeves and Wooster novel The Mating Season that there...

Dec 21

HUNGOVER WRITERS

by Milton Crawford on 21 December 2010

Many great writers have been great drinkers too, or perhaps, as The New Yorker suggests, that should be drunks. Dylan Thomas famously said that ‘An alcoholic is someone you don’t like, who drinks as much as you do’. The distinction between the two categories surely lies in a question of productivity. If you drink a lot and produce great writing, you’re a writer that drinks a lot. If you drink a lot...

Dec 20

THE HUNGOVER BREAKFAST CLUB

by Milton Crawford on 20 December 2010

The Hungover Cookbook was inspired by hangovers, of course, but also by being hungover with friends who had crashed out at my house after a hard night’s revelry. In the morning we’d wake up and resume talking and have some food together. It felt like a disjointed continuation from the previous evening. We filled in gaps. We laughed again about the same things we had laughed about while drunk. There...

Dec 13

The best present in the world!

by Milton Crawford on 13 December 2010

I am the queen of the last-minute presents. I have stopped at services stations for a less than stellar bunch of flowers, I have peeled off tags and written out gift cards as I dashed to engagements, once I even bought a bottle of bubbly as a present in the hotel bottle shop where the party was held… yes folks I’m that bad. So I have to say one of life’s little blessing is working for Random House...