THE FOLIO SOCIETY

It was in writing for magazines such as The New Yorker that Woody Allen found his comic voice. This first ever illustrated edition of his essays, short stories and playlets finds the master of parody and juxtaposition speculating on such topics as the real message of the Dead Sea Scrolls (‘The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won’t get much sleep’), what Vincent Van Gogh would have written to his brother Theo if he and his fellow impressionists had been dentists instead of artists (‘I took some dental X-rays this week that I thought were good. Degas saw them and was critical. He said the composition was bad’); and the place of the fake ink blot at key moments in history.

In one of several dazzling exercises in alternative historymaking, he takes the guise of Hitler’s barber, one Friedrich Schmeed, to give an inside account of the shaving preferences of the Third Reich – and show how, by blockading the Dardanelles, the Führer planned to cut off Britain’s supply of hot towels. From cover to cover, you will revel in some of the sharpest comic writing of the last 40 years.