The weekend revelation that Jane Austen couldn’t spell — based on research by Oxford University academic Prof Kathryn Sutherland —did not come as a revelation to me. I had already learned of her deficiency from a diary kept by Heather Mills McCartney (as she used to be).

I quote: “Janey Austen became one of the greatest novelists of all time — after I’d helped her with the spelling, mind — but even then the media wouldn’t stop persecuting her, asking her like, ‘So when are you going to get married then?’ or making snide and wicked comments that she wasn’t the marrying type . . .”

Of course, this wasn’t really Heather’s musing but a comic conceit supplied by master parodist Craig Brown (above). In The Lost Diaries* — one of the funniest books of the year — he has brought together (with some additional material) the spoof celebrity diaries he has been writing for Private Eye since 1989.

His range is remarkable, with down-marketers like Victoria Beckham and Jordan rubbing (padded) shoulders with nobs like Cecil Beaton, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire and Sir Rupert Hart Davis. There are devastating exposés of sycophants who truckle to the Royal Family, including William Shawcross and Giles Brandreth, as well as those (Cecil Beaton, Nicholas Haslam and James Lees-Milne) for whom snobbery is not so much a failing as a full-time occupation.

Himself an Old Etonian, Craig does not hesitate to finger those who make much of their connection with the school, including the snobbiest snob of them all, Anthony Powell — to rhyme, of course, with Noël and not Cowell (both present and correct).

* The Lost Diaries are published by Fourth Estate at £18.99.