The success of failure

After folding The Modern Review in 1995, Toby Young decamped to New York to make it big as a commissioning editor for Vanity Fair. His ideas flopped, his interviewees stormed off and people didn't like it when he hired a strip-o-gram on Take Your Daughter To Work Day.

No one wanted to go out with him and they told him why. He was fired from Vanity Fair, then this paper, then soft porn mag Gear. Then he got sued.

As a self-destruct manual it's hard to better, as a cheerfully desperate memoir it's top-notch. The hardback was clearly braced for the worst, plastered with such unfavourable quotes as "I'll rot in hell before I give that little bastard a quote for his book" (Julie Burchill). But there's no success like failure, and the paperback's heaped in praise; even Burchill calls it "The funniest, cleverest, most moving new book I've read for as long as I can remember".