Chancellor, a lifelong journalist, was editor for the Spectator, a British political weekly, in 1975 when Tina Brown, then 21, was looking for work. He didn´t hire her, but nearly two decades later, when she began her controversial term as editor for the venerable New Yorker, she hired him to oversee the magazine´s opening section, "The Talk of the Town." Brown was already bristling at public skepticism over a Brit´s ability to run a quintessentially American publication, so her decision to put her fellow countryman in charge of the most New York^-oriented part of the magazine seemed peculiar then and seems even more bizarre now, as Chancellor recounts his uneasy one-year tenure. He parlays his often awkward experiences into a piquant pondering of "the strangeness of being British in the U.S." and an illuminating consideration of the differences between British and American journalism.