The Embarrassing Parents: And Other Social Stereotypes from the Telegraph Magazine - Tapa dura

Neither I, The Embarrassing Parent, nor my daughter The Gap Year Student, can live without Social Stereotypes. Emma Soames Victoria Mather and Sue Macartney-Snape are not so much observers, more collectors, pinning their victims like butterflies in a display cabinet. Their observations are made with the wit and humour necessary to survive in the circles they move in. Very enjoyable. Michael Parkinson

Why can't you just grow up? chorus the kids on the way home from yet another party at which Dick and Patsy have made an exhibition of themselves, gyrating wildly to La Bamba and clearing the dance floor with their contortions during Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive. Can't family life be cringey? Emotionally exhausting, too, when the eldest daughter is lying upstairs in a sea of damp Kleenex, weeping into her mobile after being dumped by her boyfriend Giles, and son Jamie is upsetting all the family's old Australian friends with his louche behaviour on his gap year in Sydney. In the book their fans have been waiting for, Victoria Mather and Sue Macartney-Snape introduce a new cast of deliciously recognizable characters, from Serena the Flirt and her current prey Roderick (Running the Deutsche Gremlin Bank must be so exciting), to Abigail the Terrible Flatmate, with her cabbage soup diet and greying bras draped across the bath.