P. J. O'Rourke wrote more than twenty books on subjects as diverse as politics and cars and etiquette and economics. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance both reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. He was a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute, a regular panellist on NPR's Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me, and editor-in-chief of the web magazine American Consequences. Long a resident of rural New England, as far away from the things he wrote about as he could get, he died in 2022 at the age of 74.

O'Rourke has a nice, world-weary way with the US's present political follies... He hasn't lost his gift for the brutally effective one-liner.