In the original dust Jacket. Cream cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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For over forty years, John Julius Norwich has been sending out his Christmas Crackers – a personal collection of quirky quotes and literary odds and ends – to his friends instead of a Christmas card.

In The Illustrated Christmas Cracker Quentin Blake has made his own selection of favourite pieces and has illustrated them in his own trademark style. From curious dictionary definitions (‘Carphology. Delirious fumbling with the bedclothes,’ Concise Oxford Dictionary) and tortuous palindromes (‘Live dirt up a side-track carted is a putrid evil’) to eighteenth-century accounts of drunken pigs and Benjamin Franklin’s account of inventing bifocals, this cracker is stuffed with surprising, offbeat, often hilarious gems.

Enlivened by Quentin Blake’s witty illustrations, this book is the perfect stocking-filler for the discerning customer.

Christmas Crackers were compiled from whatever attracted Norwich: letters and diaries and gravestones and poems, boastful Who’s Who entries, indexes from biographies, word games such as palindromes, holorhymes and mnemonics, occasionally in untranslated Greek, French, Latin, German or whatever language they were sourced from, as well as such oddities as a review from the American outdoors magazine Field and Stream concerning the republication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. His final Christmas Cracker was the 49th. It was put together during the early part of 2018 and he corrected the final proofs from his hospital bed before he died on 1 June 2018.

Review: When I was sent this book from the publisher I was excited about sharing it with my class of children, however I found it was not possible. The text is way too advanced for them and they didn’t understand it, also some of the text was not suitable for them. This is a book that has been compiled of John Norwich’s ‘Christmas Crackers’ he sends to his family and friends at Christmas time, instead of a Christmas card. The book is made up of poetry and prose that he has found amusing.nThe illustrations in the book are wonderful, to be honest I expected nothing less from Quentin Blake! They are humorous and fit well with the text. Some of the quotes I found very funny and others not so, I do feel though that my expectations of the book did not follow with what I actually got. I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to share it with my class as it quickly became apparent this was an adult book. A nice ‘coffee table’ book as it can be flicked through and you can get a snip of enjoyment from it.

John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, CVO (15 September 1929 – 1 June 2018), also known as John Julius Norwich, was an English popular historian, writer of widely read travel books, and television personality. Cooper was born in London in 1929, the son of a Conservative politician and diplomat, Duff Cooper, and the actress, Diana Manners. Cooper joined the British Foreign Service in 1952, serving in Yugoslavia and Lebanon and as a member of the British delegation to the Disarmament Conference in Geneva. On his father’s death in 1954, he became the second Viscount Norwich. In 1964, Cooper left the diplomatic service to become a writer. His books included histories of Sicily under the Normans (1967, 1970), Venice (1977, 1981), the Byzantine Empire (1988, 1992, 1995), the Mediterranean (2006) and the Papacy (2011). He also served as an editor of series such as Great Architecture of the World, The Italian World, The New Shell Guides to Great Britain, The Oxford Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Art and the Duff Cooper Diaries. Norwich also worked extensively in radio and television. He was the host of the BBC radio panel game My Word! for four years (1978–82) and also a regional contestant on Round Britain Quiz. He wrote and presented some 30 television documentaries, including The Fall of Constantinople, Napoleon’s Hundred Days, Cortés and Montezuma, The Antiquities of Turkey, The Gates of Asia, Maximilian of Mexico, Toussaint l’Ouverture of Haiti, The Knights of Malta, Treasure Houses of Britain, and The Death of the Prince Imperial in the Zulu War.