The Complete Henry Root Letters

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If further recommendation be needed, then surely there is none finer than Glenda Slagg/Linda Lee Potter: "About as funny as pushing somebody fully clothed into a swimming pool. M Godding Books Ltd is an internet book business running from Wiltshire and sending books all over the world every working day. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Liz Reed - another character created by William Donaldson, Reed's TV production pitches - for shows such as 'Disabled Gladiators' and 'Anglotrash' - in the guise of Heart Felt Productions were collected in the 1998 book, The Heart Felt Letters.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Root first came to my attention more years ago than I care to admit when I was in Denmark and saw the televised version of Root into Europe. You Cannot Live as I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This: The Thoroughly Disgraceful Life and Times of Willie Donaldson. a b c "William Donaldson – Womanising satirist and novelist who squandered several fortunes on wild living".Jean Rook's reply "I am certainly not a thinking man's Anna Raeburn, so you must solve your own problems.

This single volume brings together "The Henry Root Letters" and "The Further Letters of Henry Root". Not only have so many of the people approached here faded from the memory that one can't quite remember why they were laughable, but some of the attitudes verge on bullying and prejudice in a way that's now well beyond the bounds of acceptability by today's mores. The cheek and audacity of Henry Root leaps off the page and each anecdote is funnier and more preposterous than the last. This book is a compendium of actual letters which the author wrote to all kinds of people of note - all from his persona of some kind of hard core petite bourgeoise British citizen.The millions who enjoyed the original 'Root' will no doubt have assumed that such a public and hysterical scam could never be repeated. The sender of these letters – a cantankerous crusader against pornography and modernity, and for hanging and Mrs.

He completed his National Service in the Royal Navy in the late 1950s, reaching the rank of Sub-Lieutenant. com, who sent a letter to all US senators, posing as a child and asking them for their favourite joke. His letters, full of alleged scandals and hanky panky, are taken perfectly seriously by their recipients whose responses are as funny as Root's own rantings. Esther Rantzen doesn't come out quite so well - there's a disagreement about whether the BBC should pay Root for some unusable script material, and Rantzen sends the same response to two different letters - the first from Root praising the show, the second, again thanking him and saying how much they appreciate viewer contributions is in response to his missive which says simply, "Dear Esther, You're a fat idiot and your show's a disgrace. The phenomenal success of the Henry Root books, especially the first, enabled Donaldson to resume his earlier chaotic lifestyle, and in the mid-1980s he began using crack cocaine.By the way , reading the Private Eye magazine I can't help comparing it's "styles" with those incredible originals scripts, written by Henry Moor. Published in 1980, what would Henry Root of the wet fish emporium make of the A to Z listers of today. He was educated at Winchester College (where he first met Julian Mitchell) and Magdalene College, Cambridge. His heroes were few, but those who were, to Root's mind, "sound" - principally Mrs Thatcher, the Dowager Lady Birdwood and James Anderton, "God's Cop", the self-appointed guardian of Greater Manchester's morals.

Donaldson lived at 139 Elm Park Mansions on Park Walk, Chelsea, London SW10, from which address all the Root letters were sent. He later remembered that "sex, whether in company or not, has been the only department in life in which I have demanded from anyone taking part the very highest standards of seriousness.

In short, he was the British version of Sarah Palin – but people apparently took him seriously (with the exception of Cambridge). The letters were published as The Henry Root Letters and The Further Letters of Henry Root and a compilation volume, The Complete Henry Root Letters. Donaldson's biographical survey of roguish Britons through the ages, Brewer's Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics (2002), has been described as "a breathtaking triumph of misdirected scholarship". When he hits a target full on, or when the target responds with good grace or a sense of humour, it's hilarious, however. His experiences there formed the basis of his first novel, Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen (1975).