Kureishi recounts his father’s long onerous journey as a migrant as a parent and as a would-be writer in parallel with his own -

Kureishi recounts his father’s long, onerous journey as a migrant, as a parent, and as a would-be writer, in parallel with his own – much more richly rewarded – raids on the cultural institutions of his time. A touching but tough-minded memoir by one writer who became famous and fulfilled, about another writer who did not. The twist – and what a ferocious emotional grip it creates – is that the failed author was Hanif Kureishi’s father. Subtitled “reading my father”, My Ear At His Heart revisits the suburban childhood and bohemian youth that Kureishi has filtered, fictionally, through previous works such as The Buddha of Suburbia. You can’t take the style without the stance, I fear.Still, if you can forgive the background hum of redundant rude words, Is It Just Me.. has much to offer today’s New Fogey.

A few entries show genuine satirical class – such as the blistering attack on “Nu-Snobbery” that aims its vitriol not at “chavs” but at the bourgeois beasts obsessed with them. Above all, Law and McArthur have that rarest of things in the stocking-filler market: a mission. They pin the rap for the physical and spiritual dreck around us on overmighty money and the media that worship it. To use the sort of language this pair understand, you may cheer up the grumpy older person in your life no end with this not-so-little Book of Crap Capitalism.. The bilious duo should know that, given that one of their own pet hates is “faux swearing”.Otherwise, this Swiftian gathering of the witless, pointless, ruthless and charmless picks its victims pretty sharply, from the obvious (Ikea, Tesco, KFC, Robbie Williams, Donald Rumsfeld, 4×4s, the Daily Mail) and the specialist (the “Intel Inside” tune, Amanda Platell, Crabtree & Evelyn, “city breaks” – especially to Bruges) to the fearlessly generic (“the Rich”) and plain weird: “overpriced toast”. The air of red-top radicalism can lead to some crashing of gears, as the writers try to sound like Richard Littlejohn or Jeremy Clarkson while cursing “homophobic Christians”, “global-warming sceptics” or.. Jeremy Clarkson. Unfortunately, their A-Z “encyclopedia of modern life” plays the enemy’s game with its potty-mouthed taste for expletives.

In an age when high-street leviathans think it’s “cool” to call their brands things like “FCUK”, casual obscenity has become a cynical marketing tool. A brisk brush with some revamped Mary Poppins will hardly get the juices of such radical whingers flowing. They crave a bit more barricade-storming attitude.Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur have scored a bull on this target with a sulphurous stocking-filler entitled Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? (TimeWarner, £9.99). Yet the cultural profile of the New Fogey has managed to wrong-foot many publishers. The startling success of a few volumes of jeremiads, notably by Lynne Truss (see page 23), has spawned a rather lacklustre flock of wannabes.