Michael Bywater

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Michael Bywater (born 11th May 1953) is a British writer and broadcaster.

He was educated at Nottingham High School. He was a long-running columnist for The Independent on Sunday, an early futurist for The Observer, spent ten years on the staff of Punch, where he wrote the Bargepole column, as well as having written regularly for The Times, and been a contributing editor to Cosmopolitan and Woman's Journal. He also regularly writes about high-tech stuff for The Daily Telegraph and a wide variety of technology magazines. He is said to be cultural critic for New Statesman. He also supervises on the Tragedy paper for a number of Cambridge colleges and, in 2006, was Writer-in-Residence at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He also collaborated with best friend Douglas Adams on three computer games, and Bywater was the inspiration for Adams' Dirk Gently character.^[1]

He previously has been identified as a Young Fogey. In The Young Fogey Handbook (Poole, Dorset: Javelin Books, 1985), author Suzanne Lowry writes: "Michael Bywater, 30-year old Punch columnist and former trendy who once worked in films, made bold to criticise Burberrys for the inferior quality of their product - the trench coats are not what they were in the days of the trenches. Burberrys riposted that indeed they could live up to their past, and made Bywater a coat to the 1915 design devised by Kitchener and Burberry - complete with camel hair lining to protect a gentleman officer's flesh on the field..."^{[citation needed]}

His book, Lost Worlds, on the human tendency towards nostalgia, was published in 2004, and his book, Big Babies, on the infantilisation of Western culture, was published in November 2006. A book on his journeys around the Australian Outback in a Cessna 172 continues to be a work in progress, due out 'soon'.

He is a certified pilot and harpsichordist. He has one daughter, Benedicta.

He also played the organ with Gary Brooker for the 'Within Our House' charity concert.^{[citation needed]}