Toby Young

About Toby Young

Toby Daniel Moorsom Young (born 1963) is a British journalist and the author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, the tale of his failed five-year attempt to make it in the U.S. as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine; and The Sound of No Hands Clapping, a follow-up about his failure to make it as a Hollywood screenwriter. His obnoxious wit has earned him almost as many enemies as admirers and the title of "England's heterosexual Truman Capote".

Toby Young's father was Michael Young, a Labour life peer and pioneering sociologist who introduced the term "meritocracy". His mother was the novelist, sculptor and painter Sasha Moorsom. He was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford (gaining a first in PPE), as well as Harvard and Trinity College, Cambridge. At Oxford he started a magazine named The Danube, discovering his interest in journalism. After leaving Oxford in 1986 he joined The Times but was later fired. He then left for Harvard as a Fulbright scholar where he worked as a teaching fellow in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and became a devoted reader of Spy, the satirical magazine co-edited by Graydon Carter. He returned to England in 1988, and through 1990 worked as a teaching assistant at Cambridge in the Social and Political Sciences Faculty.

In 1991, Young founded and edited the Modern Review with Julie Burchill and her then husband Cosmo Landesman. Its motto was "low culture for highbrows". In 1995, with the magazine close to financial ruin, Young closed it down, angering his principal financial backer Peter York. This decision led to a fierce public battle with Burchill and her then lover, Charlotte Raven, a writer at the magazine.