Brown was educated at
Eton and the
University of Bristol and then became a freelance journalist in London, contributing to ''
Harper's & Queen (collaborating with Lesley Cunliffe on articles, some of which resulted in books), Tatler, The Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, the Evening Standard (as a regular columnist), The Times (notably as parliamentary sketchwriter; these columns were compiled into a book called A Life Inside
) and The Sunday Times (as TV and restaurant critic). He later continued his restaurant column in The Sunday Telegraph and has contributed a weekly book review to The Mail on Sunday. He created the characters of "Bel Littlejohn", an ultra-trendy New Labour type, in The Guardian, and "Wallace Arnold", an extremely reactionary conservative, in The Independent on Sunday''. In 2001, he took over
Auberon Waugh's "Way of the World" in
The Daily Telegraph following Waugh's death, but lost the column in December 2008. He also has a column in the
Daily Mail. Brown also writes comedy shows such as
Norman Ormal for TV (in which he appeared as a returning officer) and his radio show
This Is Craig Brown was broadcast on
BBC Radio 4 in 2004. It featured comics
Rory Bremner and
Harry Enfield and other media personalities. He has appeared on television as a critic on
BBC Two's
Late Review as well as in documentaries such as
Russell Davies's life of
Ronald Searle. His book
1966 and All That takes its title, and some other elements, from
1066 and All That, extending its history of Britain through to the beginning of the 21st century. A
BBC Radio 4 adaptation followed in September 2006, in similar vein to
This Is Craig Brown.
The Tony Years is a comic overview of the years of
Tony Blair's government, published in paperback by
Ebury Press in June 2007. Brown's predominantly factual biography of
Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, ''
Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret'', was published in 2017 and won the 2018
James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the biography category. In 2020, Brown's book
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time won the £50,000
Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. In announcing the award,
Martha Kearney, the chair of the judging panel, described the book as "a joyous, irreverent, insightful celebration of
the Beatles, a highly original take on familiar territory. [...] It's also a profound book about success and failure which won the unanimous support of our judges. Craig Brown has reinvented the art of biography". Brown wrote an essay,
The Slippery Art of Biography, for the
Times Literary Supplement in 2021 and presented it at the
Edinburgh International Book Festival the following year. ==Personal life==