The Complete Yes Prime Minister

The Complete YES MINISTER and The Complete YES PRIME MINISTER both became huge best-sellers perhaps because people realized that they were not simply printed versions of the celebrated television series: since they ridicule not only the British Government but also political memoirs, they are major works of political satire in their own right. Indeed, Brian Walden in The Standard described The Complete YES MINISTER as ..."the greatest political textbook in the English language".

That book spent 106 weeks in the Sunday Times top-ten fiction list, has been translated into numerous foreign languages and was described by the New York Times Book Review as "...the funniest, wittiest and truest piece of political satire to be published on either side of the Atlantic in the post-Evelyn Waugh period". Not to be out-done, The Washington Post described the book as "...a priceless comic treasure" and the authors as "...a madcap combination of Jonathan Swift, George Bernard Shaw and the George Orwell of Politics And The English Language."

The Complete YES PRIME MINISTER continued this amazing success: never out of the top-ten for it's first six months and the number one bestseller for twelve weeks. Uniquely, at Christmas 1986 they were at numbers one and two respectively. In the Sunday Times Bestsellers of the Decade, 1980-89, the two volumes were eventually listed as number two and number three.

The TV series. which have been showered with awards, were required viewing among top politicians and civil servants, and were seen in over fifty countries around the world. The books have become part of the English cultural tradition, just as Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker have become part of the English language. Many literary classics become television and film classics. YES MINISTER and YES PRIME MINISTER have the rare distinction of becoming classics of English comic literature.