For some years, the biographer Roger Lewis has been entertaining his friends with a letter at Christmas, in which he records details of the joys and frustrations of his life as it is actually lived.
Here for the first time in a book-length version of this 'cult classic', a hilarious collection of diaries and memoirs - highlights of which include a trip up the Amazon River with countless ants and Maureen Lipman; his eldest son Tristan training to be a juggler at Zippos Circus ('Frankly, where did Magdalen College, Oxford, ever get me, eh?'); the mystery of the stolen kettle at Age Concern; the humiliation of not being invited to the premiere of his very own movie at Cannes; and the way the Dell call-centre people in Bombay keep thinking he's a woman ...
With his sharp eye for folly, his malice - and the unexpected shafts of humanity in spite of his chronic ill temper - Roger Lewis is the Evelyn Waugh of the 21st century. These addictive and paradoxically life-enhancing Seasonal Suicide Notes have the makings of a lasting comic masterpiece.
