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Milligan's Meaning of Life
Milligan's Meaning of Life
Oct 7, 2024 12:27 AM

Author:Spike Milligan

Milligan's Meaning of Life

Milligan's Meaning of Life is a glorious celebration of the legendary Spike Milligan. Here you will find his most intimate and hilarious reflections on life.

With his lightning-quick wit, unbridled creativity and his ear for the absurd, Milligan revolutionised British comedy. Throughout his life, Milligan also wrote prolifically - scripts, poetry, fiction, as well as several volumes of memoir, in which he took an entirely idiosyncratic approach to the truth. In this ground-breaking work, Norma Farnes, his long-time manager, companion, counsellor and confidante, gathers together the loose threads, reads between the lines and draws on the full breadth of his writing to present his life in his own words: an autobiography - of sorts.

From his childhood in India, through his early career as a jazz musician and sketch-show entertainer, his spells in North Africa and Italy with the Royal Artillery, to that fateful first broadcast of The Goon Show and beyond into the annals of comedy history, this is the autobiography Milligan never wrote.

'Milligan is the Great God to all of us' John Cleese

'The Godfather of Alternative Comedy' Eddie Izzard

Spike Milligan was one of the greatest and most influential comedians of the twentieth century. Born in India in 1918, he served in the Royal Artillery during WWII in North Africa and Italy. At the end of the war, he forged a career as a jazz musician, sketch-show writer and performer, before joining forces with Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe to form the legendary Goon Show. Until his death in 2002, he had success as on stage and screen and as the author of over eighty books of fiction, memoir, poetry, plays, cartoons and children's stories.

Reviews

Milligan is the Great God to all of us

—— John Cleese

The Godfather of Alternative Comedy

—— Eddie Izzard

My father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic.

—— Spike Milligan

Close in stature to Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear in his command of the profound art of nonsense

—— Guardian

Milligan is the Great God to all of us

—— John Cleese

The Godfather of Alternative Comedy

—— Eddie Izzard

That absolutely glorious way of looking at things differently. A great man

—— Stephen Fry

Manifestly a genius, a comic surrealist genius and had no equal

—— Terry Wogan

A totally original comedy writer

—— Michael Palin

Potent ... journalism of a high order. Like all good reporters, Burke is something of a scholar, drawing meticulously on interview notes years old, and on extensive background reading. He excels, too, in describing the experiences of ordinary Muslims; such insights make this book essential for understanding the past decade

—— Sherard Cowper-Coles , Sunday Times

Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature.

—— New York Review of Books

Powerful, sparse prose

—— Vogue

Compelling...brief but intense...Morrison writes with her usual lyricism

—— Literary Review

It is beautifully, sparely written, as with all Morrison's work, and lingers in the mind long after the final page is turned

—— Sunday Express

Spare and visual…a writer of consummate.

—— Times

Pulsing with imaginative energy, it displays Morrison’s veteran ability to combine physical and social immediacy with psychological and emotional subtlety. A fine addition to Morrison’s expansive chronicling of black American history, Home is a compact triumph.

—— Sunday Times

A highly fractured tale intended to resemble the crumbling nature of Money’s existence post war. Nothing is over-laboured. Each word resounds with sultry, heat-oppressive Georgia.

—— Spectator

Morrison's writing is so deft that even barely sketched characters leap off the page

—— Sunday Telegraph

Home is a powerful reminder of the impact the past plays on the present

—— The Times

Morrison can say more in one word than most novelists manage in an entire book. Superb

—— Glasgow Sunday Herald

Bursting with poetic language and horrific events this is a penetrating insight to the African-American experience

—— The Lady

It is a powerful set-up, building suspense and a mounting sense of anxiety

—— Guardian

Toni Morrison’s mesmerising prose manages to be both elegiac and visceral at the same time

—— Mail on Sunday
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