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. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. I love this book and his laugh out style at trying to rankle celebrities and people in the public eye. 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. 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.

This time around Root has written an appalling soap opera about the decline of moral standards in modern Britain and put together a new volume crammed with letters to famous actors, directors and other worthies up and down the land. He was educated at Winchester College (where he first met Julian Mitchell) and Magdalene College, Cambridge. 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.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Published in 1980, what would Henry Root of the wet fish emporium make of the A to Z listers of today. His experiences there formed the basis of his first novel, Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen (1975). This single volume brings together "The Henry Root Letters" and "The Further Letters of Henry Root".

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. Back in 1979, people with too much time on their hands could send actual letters to leading politicians, judges and other luminaries of light entertainment, and expect a reply. Donaldson's ghastly creation wrote outrageous, threatening, scurrilous and outlandish letters to public figures, praising, insulting or attempting to bribe them. M Godding Books Ltd is an internet book business running from Wiltshire and sending books all over the world every working day. Jean Rook's reply "I am certainly not a thinking man's Anna Raeburn, so you must solve your own problems.He completed his National Service in the Royal Navy in the late 1950s, reaching the rank of Sub-Lieutenant. 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.

The sender of these letters – a cantankerous crusader against pornography and modernity, and for hanging and Mrs. 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. He established himself as a central player in the British satire boom of the early 1960s, as co-producer, with Donald Albery, of Beyond the Fringe (1960), and of dramatisations of J.Root wrote the BBC – I think Monty Python had his number, the Queen, Prince Charles, various publishing houses.

The cheek and audacity of Henry Root leaps off the page and each anecdote is funnier and more preposterous than the last. You Cannot Live As I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This: The thoroughly disgraceful life and times of Willie Donaldson.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. Supposedly a wet fish merchant from Fulham, he is an avatar for a lot of the to-the-right-of-Attila-the-Hun, Thatcher-supporting, mildly racist, entitled, liberal-baiting mansplaining that was de rigeur and absolutely unchallenged in the Spectator/Private Eye yachts and casinos circles that Donaldson frequented.