What Am I Still Doing Here?: My Life as Me (Paperback)
  • What Am I Still Doing Here?: My Life as Me (Paperback)
zoom

What Am I Still Doing Here?: My Life as Me (Paperback)

(author)
£10.99
Paperback 384 Pages
Published: 10/05/2012
Free UK delivery on orders over £25, otherwise £2.99
  • In stock

Usually dispatched within 1-2 days

Free UK delivery on orders over £25, otherwise £2.99
  • This item has been added to your basket

'Unremittingly glorious. I and the world demand more and we shall thump our tin mugs on the table demanding it until we are satisfied.'
Stephen Fry
Loveable... Dreadful... Amazing... Learned... Baroque... Exquisite... Utterly wonderful... Uplifting... Stupendously Acute... Very scary... Genuinely mad...Having written acclaimed biographies of uncompromising and glittering geniuses such as Peter Sellers, Laurence Olivier, Carry On star Charles Hawtrey, and Anthony Burgess, of A Clockwork Orange fame, Roger Lewis, rotund, dark and difficult, has at long last stumbled upon the greatest monster of all - himself.As with bestselling and beloved Seasonal Suicide Notes, in this new book Lewis has produced a funny and appalling self-portrait, crammed with his clashes and frustrations.The calamities he describes, however, such as coming a pathetic fifth in the Oxford Chair of Poetry Election or throwing a party in what turned out to be a Cornish old peoples' home, are always offset by beautiful riffs - about Seville, a city he can't keep away from; or the train ride from Salzburg to Venice, where he stays in the restaurant car so long he alights in Zagreb by mistake; or the lush flowering magnolias he sees at Agatha Christie's house on the River Dart.It was when Lewis suggested in the press that Agatha Christie was a lesbian that the death threats began.Hearing the overture to Iolanthe played on Radio Three, and his own name mentioned by the announcer, Lewis is conveyed back to his extraordinary Welsh past, where Gilbert & Sullivan was put on in the village hall, and where Roger Lewis knew at once that his destiny was to become Evil Fairy, complete with wand.Who is to say he has not succeeded in this ambition?What Am I Still Doing Here? will win its author hordes more passionate devotees.'There is only one writer alive today who is as mordantly funny as Kingsley Amis, as acute about human misery as Philip Larkin, and as brilliant in skewering pretension and vanity as both. His name is Roger Lewis... Nothing funnier or wise has been published all year. If you love someone buy them this book. If they don't appreciate the gift then purge them from your life.'
Mail on Sunday
'The funniest book of the year. What Am I Still Doing Here? by Roger Lewis is a wonderfully splenetic journal - part-diary, part-diatribe - by a man who rages with an indignant eloquence against the modern world. But Lewis' furious rants are never far from hilarity, and his anger is redeemed by flashes of pur poetry. Like all the best comics, Lewis is a disappointed optimist rather than an outright cynic, and it's this thwarted idealism which makes this such a liberating, life-affirming read.'
Independent

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 9781444708691
Number of pages: 384
Weight: 269 g
Dimensions: 196 x 128 x 26 mm


MEDIA REVIEWS

Nothing funnier or wiser has been published all year. - Daily Mail

Superb, splenetic, self-lacerating, hilarious and heartrendering. - Gyles Brandreth

Uproariously funny, tremendously clever and irresistibly lovable. - Rupert Christiansen

The jokes come thick and fast. - Express

A liberating, life-affirming read. - Independent

Enormously entertaining - Evening Standard

Wonderfully funny - The Spectator

'Unremittingly glorious. I and the world demand more and we shall thump our tin mugs on the table demanding it until we are satisfied.' - Stephen Fry

There is only one writer alive today who is as mordantly funny as Kingsley Amis, as acute about human misery as Philip Larkin, and as brilliant in skewering pretension and vanity as both. His name is Roger Lewis... Nothing funnier or wise has been published all year. If you love someone buy them this book. If they don't appreciate the gift then purge them from your life. - Michael Gove, Mail on Sunday

'Uproariously funny, tremendously clever and irresistibly lovable' - Rupert Christiansen, Mail on Sunday

'Roger Lewis's new memoir takes us on an anarchic rollercoaster ride through what is probably the nearest thing to an autobiography he will ever write. Numerous hilarious routines jostle in the pages for attention. Lewis's strength is that behind all his acrobatics there is a richly stocked intellect at the controls. Stylistically he is ultramodern, a deracinated 'everyman; for the 21st century. - Duncan Fallowell, Telegraph

'The funniest book of the year. What Am I Still Doing Here? by Roger Lewis is a wonderfully splenetic journal - part-diary, part-diatribe - by a man who rages with an indignant eloquence against the modern world. But Lewis' furious rants are never far from hilarity, and his anger is redeemed by flashes of pur poetry. Like all the best comics, Lewis is a disappointed optimist rather than an outright cynic, and it's this thwarted idealism which makes this such a liberating, life-affirming read.' - Independent

'The jokes come thick and fast, the humour runs deep and dark. Among the belly laughs, Roger Lewis gifts us plenty of thought-provoking diamonds.' - Graham Ball, Sunday Express

He can be lethally catty and he also has an unfailingly sharp eye for absurdity. He is wonderfully funny, with a uniquely skewed take on the world.' - John Preston, Spectator

'There's nobody else in the history of the world who is simultaneously as crude and dangerous or so gentle and poetic... Lewis, with his original and eloquent voice is nothing less than heroic.' - Esquire

'Lewis is a marvellously wayward spirit, as well-versed in lavatory humour as in the classics, capable of taking in the gutter and the stars at a single glance.' 5* - The Lady

'Enormously entertaining... It is generous, sincere and intelligent, and shows that Lewis is more than just the angry buffoon he paints himself as.' - Evening Standard

What Am I Still Doing Here? by Roger Lewis is one of those reads that is full of grumpy, thunderous, brilliantly funny observations - Robert Bathurst, star of Downton Abbey, Daily Express

You may also be interested in...

Thunderclap
Added to basket
Paperback
£12.99 £10.99
The World of Virginia Woolf
Added to basket
Jokes, Jokes, Jokes
Added to basket
Hardback
£25.00 £19.99
Jane Austen Playing Cards
Added to basket
Super-Infinite
Added to basket
Paperback
£10.99
The Year of Magical Thinking
Added to basket
Wifedom
Added to basket
Paperback
£10.99
Free
Added to basket
Paperback
£10.99
Didion & Babitz
Added to basket
Hardback
£20.00
Agatha Christie Bingo
Added to basket
Unleashed
Added to basket
Hardback
£30.00 £15.00
Blythe Spirit
Added to basket
Hardback
£25.00
Sophie From Romania
Added to basket
Hardback
£22.00 £17.99
Knife
Added to basket
Hardback
£20.00 £16.99

Please sign in to write a review

Your review has been submitted successfully.