Diddly Squat

Essays and criticism

Print length: 208 pagesPenguin Books, Limited, 2025

Description

After three years of hard-won experience, Jeremy Clarkson returns to the daily struggle of running Diddly Squat Farm, where every promising scheme meets weather, animals, bureaucracy, or human resistance. Hoping to diversify the business, he pursues plans involving rewilding and nettle soup, only to encounter local opposition, planning restrictions, ridicule, and multiplying red tape. Meanwhile, cows, a rented bull, piglets, and obstinate goats turn routine husbandry into a succession of practical tests. These comic farm dispatches set Clarkson’s expansive confidence against the unforgiving details of agricultural life: costs, regulations, unpredictable creatures, and plans that rarely survive contact with reality. Beneath the mishaps lies a sustained account of why farming inspires optimism even when its economics and institutions seem designed to defeat it.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Direct · Witty

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Earnest · Hopeful · Humorous · Irreverent

Structure

Episodic

Focus

Ideas · Information · Voice

Emotional intensity

2 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 2 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

AmbitionCommunityNature and environmentPowerWork

About Jeremy Clarkson

Jeremy Clarkson is a British broadcaster, journalist and writer whose books carry the emphatic comic voice of his television work into short-form nonfiction. His background in local journalism and motoring gives him a reporter’s appetite for practical detail, though he rarely remains confined to the stated subject. Many of his books collect newspaper columns, and their structure suits his characteristic method: begin with a car, news item, or minor nuisance, then follow it through digression, exaggeration, and blunt judgment. In Don’t Stop Me Now, engineering details such as torque steer and suspension open into arguments about marketing, bureaucracy, taste, and public behavior. The World According to Clarkson ranges even more freely across sport, technology, celebrity, and current affairs, enlarging everyday irritations into compact comic disputes. Diddly Squat places the same expansive confidence against farming’s stubborn particulars. Weather, livestock, costs, planning rules, and failed schemes supply a continuing sequence of practical setbacks, recorded in direct, conversational prose.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Penguin Books, Limited
Language: English
ISBN: 9780241728192

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