What Am I Still Doing Here?: My Years as Me Book

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.