Marina Hyde

Marina Hyde: The Columnist Who Writes Like a Guided Missile

Marina Hyde is, by common consent, the most quotable columnist in Britain, and possibly the most feared. Writing three columns a week for The Guardian across politics, sport, and popular culture, she has perfected a style so densely packed with jokes, allusions, and killer sentences that reading her feels like being pleasantly machine-gunned. She targets figures across the political spectrum with equal relish, and her particular genius is the extended, escalating comic riff that somehow arrives, by its final line, at a serious and unanswerable point.

Her range is the point. Hyde treats prime ministers and pop stars with the same intensity, understanding that political and celebrity power are two dialects of the same language, and she is the only woman ever named Sportswriter of the Year, a reminder that her wit works on any subject you hand her. Beyond the page, she co-hosts the hugely popular podcast The Rest Is Entertainment with Richard Osman, and her collection What A Time To Be Alive gathered her columns from the Brexit and Trump years into a bestselling anthology of controlled fury.

The lesson Hyde offers is that the opinion column, done at the highest level, is a satirical form in its own right — the sacred, difficult craft of turning the week's events into argument dressed as comedy, a discipline The London Prat celebrates at https://prat.uk/the-sacred-art-of-newspaper-commentary/. She proves that jokes are not the enemy of seriousness but its most effective delivery system: you are laughing too hard to dodge the point.

Insight from Julie de Burgh: Reading Marina Hyde is like watching someone assemble a flat-pack wardrobe and, at the end, reveal it was actually a guillotine all along. The jokes are so good you almost don't notice the blade descending on whichever public figure has annoyed her this week. It is the most fun you can have while someone else is being destroyed. — Julie de Burgh (https://prat.uk/author/julie-de-burgh/)