Oxford has been portrayed as all gown, no town in a book celebrating British stereotypes, writes Amanda

Castleman. Ironically, the biting portrait of academic toffs - swilling champers and pontificating - comes from a Brasenose College graduate.

A Tourist's Guide to the British is Simon Henry's first published book, full of good-natured mockery and Mark Bennington's deft cartoons. Containing a nation's caricatures, there's something to offend almost anyone.

Oxford was lumped in with the Other Place, Cambridge: "The twin ancient university cities are idyllic centres of learning, culture and architectural majesty, spoiled only by the students resident there.

"By day, the pretentious undergraduates in distinctive college scarves ride their bicycles along the cobbled streets, reciting epic Greek poetry or complicated mathematical formulas to their peers.

"By night they stage humorous reviews or obscure plays and buy vintage champagne or port on Daddy's credit card.

"Following final examinations, taken in full evening dress, the students are doused with flour, double cream and confetti by their friends - in a ritual as arcane as the Universities themselves." He know whereof he speaks. Simon, 29, completed a masters degree in politics here. "Oxford has a strange dreamlike quality - it makes those philosophical discussions seem perfectly normal.

"I'm sure the stereotype of an uppercrust student will ring a few bells with the Townies," he laughs.

This smacks of hypocrisy in the mouth of a man with two post-graduate degrees and a job in virtual newscasting. But no, Simon insists he is a man of the people. "I never swilled champagne and I'm calling you from a telephone box because I don't even have a mobile phone," he points out. Fair enough.

The author certainly doesn't pull any punches for his native land, Yorkshire. Folk in those parts, he writes, "will occasionally smile - usually when they are about to pass wind".

The South Coast was lampooned for its "widows in see-through plastic headscarves", while Glaswegians were branded as "preferring to spend their hard-earned social security money on McEwan's Export and unfiltered cigarettes".

Yet Simon sees this all as good, clean fun - mostly harmless. "There's always something to laugh at. It makes life happier."

A Tourist's Guide to the British is available only from www.amazon.co.uk at the moment. Published by Nightingale, the petite book retails for £2.99

Story date: Wednesday 01 March

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.