This is basically a collection of articles that Mitchell wrote for his newspaper column, and that means that we’ve got a lot of different topics to take a look at here. It’s basically the usual fare that you’d expect from him, railing at the injustices of the world and the bizarreness of everyday life. Any physicist would accept that. And I wish to remain stationary. My ambition as a teenager was to do what I do for a job in almost exactly the way I do it. And that’s what I want to continue to do as a job until I retire. I don’t want to be a film star and I don’t want to go to Hollywood.” A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood. – William Shenstone A lie is enough to prove you are a liar. Lies help people to forget about the things you have done in the past and remain constant for whole future as doubt. – Nishan Panwar

Once you place that crown of a liar on your head, you can take it off again, but it leaves a stain for all time. – Terry Goodkind Still, he increasingly questions why he’s writing a column after 11 years on the job. What he continues to savour, though, is the immediacy and reliability of a column by comparison with television, where most ideas die a long and anonymous death, never seeing the light of an audience’s eyes. That’s how painkillers are pitched: clean, targeted, medicinal. “Feeling crap? Drug yourself up a bit!” Is not a slogan that’s caught on. “Try smothering your body’s warning system with a chemical – hopefully everything will have sorted itself out by the time it wears off!” just doesn’t have the reassuring pharmaceutical feel that’s vital to building brand confidence. – Excerpt from Dishonesty Is The Second Best Policy This isn't a book, it's a collection of articles published by Mitchell. There is no coherent purpose or outcome of the text and little point in reading it. I bought it because of a really thought provoking comment he made on a chat show while promoting the book. Turns out that was the only thing worth reading, and I already knew it because of Mitchell's spoiler. And now I'm just more annoyed because I've forgotten the one good thing in the whole book.Dishonesty Is The Second Best Policy is no exception. Wry, cutting, smart and full of facts and knowledge you didn’t think you needed to know. Chapters cover popular and unpopular cultures, such as the huge shift towards veganism, the titans of the 21st century, the internet and how social media is slowly destroying us all, and my favourite chapter heading; no artex please, we’re British. However, my absolute favourite part is when Mitchell tries to dissect just what the hell Liam Neeson was thinking with his colossally surprising outburst while doing a press junket for Cold Pursuit. Just brilliant. In his column for this newspaper and in the comic riffs for which he is known on shows such as QI or Have I Got News For You, he is a satirist of crass innovations, a poet of minor irritations. But in Dishonesty Is the Second-Best Policy, a collection of his columns from the past three years, Mitchell has reached a more macro-scale judgment. His ire is aimed not at film-set canteens but at the world at large, or at least the British part of it. In his opinion, he writes, Britain is now a country where things are “generally getting worse”. My ambition as a teenager was to do what I now do. I don’t want to be a film star and I don’t want to go to Hollywood Why did he want to write a newspaper column? “It was something comedians of previous generations that I’d admired had also done. I often asked myself in career terms, ‘Would Stephen Fry have done it?’ He’s brilliant and emulating him seems like a safe course of action . . . TV projects are big and they’re long term but [with] the column, every week you have to come up with something and it feels like a mountain to climb. You’re drawn to write something and then there’s a thing in the world that wasn’t there before. It’s a nice feeling.”

I'm tired of being lied to by the government, the media, and by every corporation. I have anything to do with. – L. Neil Smith hate to be put in a position where I am completely in control because, then if something goes wrong, then it is entirely my fault" What has changed since he started writing the column? “I’m so conscious of people who are easily offended now,” he says, “both sincerely offended and in other cases recreationally offended. In the comedy world before 2010, it felt like you could sort of say anything. Your point of view was your defence. It wasn’t what you were joking about or the words you used but the point you were trying to make and the point of view you came from [that mattered]. Now anything can be taken out of context and people are looking to take things out of context and deciding you should be thrown out of civilisation.”Does he have any hope for the future? He laughs. “A slightly more optimistic part of me says things do shift over time,” he says. “The fact that there are so many young people and children going on the streets and saying ‘Stop f**king up the planet, it needs to remain habitable’ is a sign of a demographic shift in attitudes. Sometimes things just get better. That’s the closest I’ve got to solid optimism at the moment.” Acting Opinion columns for The Observer, ranging across the usual set of current affairs and personal observations, but most closely circling British politics of the last four years. But if you're determined to give it a go, you might enjoy this eclectic collection (or eclection) of David Mitchell's attempts to make light of all that darkness. Scampi, politics, the Olympics, terrorism, exercise, rude street names, inheritance tax, salad cream, proportional representation and farts are all touched upon by Mitchell's unremitting laser of chit-chat, as he negotiates a path between the commercialisation of Christmas and the true spirit of Halloween. Read this book and slightly change your life! I've always operated under the notion that audiences don't always know when they're being lied to but that they always know when they're being told the truth. – Sean Penn Does he think that by putting aside big ideologies in favour of faith in incremental progress, liberals created a vacuum that was filled by chauvinistic nationalism? “Maybe you’re right,” he says. “If you don’t make the huge ideological arguments that underline the direction you’re pushing in, then maybe someone else will make a counter-ideological argument that people might fall to . . . What’s so lamentably predictable about the extremism is that it comes in the wake of the financial crash.” ‘Would Stephen Fry have done it?’

I used to like old-fashioned things like classic cars,” he says. “And that’s fine because when they’re fading into the past and the future is perhaps less picturesque but fairer, then you can enjoy reminiscing about the picturesque.” I wasn't sure whether to give this 4 stars or 3. Mitchell is a funny man, who I mostly know from watching British game shows on YouTube. (I know how to live.) He is most famous in the states for the Mitchell and Webb series, which is genuinely brilliant. And this book is good but there are more smiles than laughs in this compilation of newspaper columns. What has he learned over the years the book represents? He laughs. “Well, that’s a damning question because I don’t know. I think I’m still shouting, ‘Look at what just happened!’” Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen. – Maimonides He is so much fun in a verbal spar with other comedians, but in the Introduction to this volume….not so much, I’m sorry to say. The Introduction makes some excessively loquacious remarks about dishonesty that’s funny in spots. Skim it or skip it but don’t stop there! (Hey, doesn’t the word “skip” in the queen’s language mean “trash can?”)He thinks for a moment. “Genuinely, I think the internet and the smartphone have been a disaster for civilisation,” he says. “I think it would be very helpful for us to see it as a disaster, see it as something like nuclear weapons or . . . I was going to say the invention of heroin, but morphine is a wonder drug, so there’s an upside to heroin which I really can’t f**king see with the internet. It’s easier to get taxis, but that’s it. It’s addictive. It changes the nature of discourse in a horrible way. What was billed as the democratisation of knowledge has turned into the death of truth.”