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.

Silly Verse for Kids - a hilarious collection of silly poems by Spike Milligan! A collection of the absurd, ridiculous, sublime and characteristically anarchic verse from the brilliant Spike Milligan. With his very own illustrations, this collection, which includes the famous On the Ning Nang Nong will make you laugh from the bottom of your belly - just like Spike did.

Spike Milligan's publishing career began over forty years ago when Silly Verse for Kids was published in 1959. His poems were inspired by listening to his own children, and subsequently his grandchildren, and marvelling at the way they could invent new words or incorporate sound effects into their everyday language. Spike did not regard children as small adults, but as entirely different species who lived in a secret, magical world that very few adults understood. For decades he delved into this world, delighting children - and adults - of all ages with his poems and stories. Illustrated throughout with Spike's own drawings and specially commissioned artworks, this is an ideal read-alone or read-aloud book for Spike fans of all ages, featuring: Silly Verse for Kids (1959), The Bald Twit Lion (1968), A Book of Milliganimals (1968), Unspun Socks from a Chicken's Laundry (1968), Sir Nobonk and the Terrible, Awful, Dreadful, Nasty Dragon (1982), and Startling Verse for All the Family (1987).

Boy is Roald Dahl's extraordinary glimpse into his childhood and early life. 'An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details. This is not an autobiography. I would never write a history of myself. On the other hand, throughout my young days at school and just afterwards a number of things happened to me that I have never forgotten . . .' Boy is a funny, insightful and at times grotesque glimpse into the early life of Roald Dahl, one of the world's favourite authors. We discover his experiences of the English public school system, the idyllic paradise of summer holidays in Norway, the pleasures (and pains) of the sweetshop, and how it is that he avoided being a Boazer. This is the unadulterated childhood - sad and funny, macabre and delightful - that inspired Britain's favourite storyteller and also speaks of an age which vanished with the coming of the Second World War.

Peter Sinclair is tormented by bereavement and failure. In an attempt to conjure some meaning from his life, he embarks on an autobiography, but he finds himself writing the story of another man in another, imagined, world, whose insidious attraction draws him even further in...

Christopher Priest is the Arthur C. Clarke Award and World Fantasy Award-winning author of THE SEPARATION, THE GLAMOUR, THE DREAM ARCHIPELAGO and THE PRESTIGE, which was filmed by Christopher Nolan and starred Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. THE AFFIRMATION is his compulsive and original novel of an autobiography that isn't - partly a thriller, partly a haunting study of schizophrenia, it is the mark of one of Britain's finest novelists at the very height of his powers. Peter Sinclair is tormented by bereavement and failure. In an attempt to conjure some meaning from his life, he embarks on an autobiography, but he finds himself writing the story of another man in another, imagined, world, whose insidious attraction draws him even further in...

A masterpiece of autobiography, and perhaps the first literary memoir of an addict, the Penguin Classics edition of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is edited with an introduction by Barry Milligan. Confessions is a remarkable account of the pleasures and pains of worshipping at the 'Church of Opium'. Thomas De Quincey consumed daily large quantities of laudanum (at the time a legal painkiller), and this autobiography of addiction hauntingly describes his surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings through London, along with the nightmares, despair and paranoia to which he became prey. The result is a work in which the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams, memory and imagination are seamlessly interwoven, describing in intimate detail the mind-altering pleasures and pains unique to opium. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater forged a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, paving the way for later generations of literary addicts from Baudelaire to James Frey, and anticipating psychoanalysis with its insights into the subconscious. This edition is based on the original serial version of 1821, and reproduces two 'sequels', 'Suspiria de Profundis' (1845) and 'The English Mail-Coach' (1849). It also includes a critical introduction discussing the romantic figure of the addict and the tradition of confessional literature, and an appendix on opium in the nineteenth century. Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) studied at Oxford, failing to take his degree but discovering opium. He later met Coleridge, Southey and the Wordsworths. From 1828 until his death he lived in Edinburgh and made his living from journalism.

In 1924 the Boundary Commission is tasked with creating the new official division between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Through incompetence, dereliction of duty and sheer perversity, the border ends up running through the middle of the small town of Puckoon. Houses are divided from outhouses, husbands separated from wives, bars are cut off from their patrons, churches sundered from graveyards. And in the middle of it all is poor Dan Milligan, our feckless protagonist, who is taunted and manipulated by everyone (including the sadistic author) to try and make some sense of this mess...

Jerome Klapka Jerome was an English writer and humorist. My Life and Times is an autobiography novel, an entertaining account of Jerome's life including an experience of his family falling into poverty owing to bad investments. He published it in 1926 being in his late sixties.

A wonderful anthology of poems to set fire to the imagination. We only have to 'remember, remember the 5th of November' to see a dark night filled with fireworks and bonfires. In their many different ways - through their sounds, rhythms, stories, surprises and jokes - these poems will set the fireworks crackling in our own heads. Michael Morpurgo has brought together poems by writers as diverse as Spike Milligan and Louis MacNeice, Stevie Smith and John Lennon, Jo Shapcott and Lewis Carroll. Once read, they won't be forgotten - some even beg to be learned by heart.

Jerome Klapka Jerome was an English writer and humourist. My Life and Times is an autobiography novel, an entertaining account of Jerome's life including an experience of his family falling into poverty owing to bad investments. He published it in 1926 being in his late sixties.

Jerome Klapka Jerome was an English writer and humourist. My Life and Times is an autobiography novel, an entertaining account of Jerome's life including an experience of his family falling into poverty owing to bad investments. He published it in 1926 being in his late sixties.

Sterne's utterly original novel - the meandering, maddening 'autobiography' of one of literature's oldest comic characters. Doomed to become the ‘sport of fortune’ by an interruption at the crucial moment of conception, Tristram Shandy’s life lurches from one mishap to another: his nose crushed by the doctor’s forceps during birth, christened with the wrong name, an unfortunate incident involving a slamming sash window… Discover the anti-autobiography of the hilarious Tristram Shandy.

A classic story of trying circumstances and enduring hope, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is an eloquentaccount of the young man's life under slavery and his eventual escape. Written as an attempt to enhance his abolitionist credentials, it became the best-selling fugitive slave narrative of the era. This autobiography is a powerful reminder of the brutality of slavery and the terrors African-Americans were forced to endure.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 - 1930) was an English writer best known for his detective stories about Sherlock Holmes. This book is an autobiography of Sir Doyle, describing different aspects of his professional life as an adventurer, doctor, sportsman, box fan, and writer. It also describes most of his adventures and relationship with many famous figures like Kipling, Arthur Balfour, and Oscar Wilde.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 - 1930) was an English writer best known for his detective stories about Sherlock Holmes. This book is an autobiography of Sir Doyle, describing different aspects of his professional life as an adventurer, doctor, sportsman, box fan, and writer. It also describes most of his adventures and relationship with many famous figures like Kipling, Arthur Balfour, and Oscar Wilde.