The most irreverent, hilarious book about the war that I have ever read - Sunday Express

Brilliant verbal pyrotechnics ... throwaway lines and marvelous anecdotes - Daily Mail

Desperately funny, vivid, vulgar - Sunday Times

Close in stature to Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear in his command of the profound art of nonsense - Guardian

Milligan is the Great God to all of us -- John Cleese

The Godfather of Alternative Comedy -- Eddie Izzard

That absolutely glorious way of looking at things differently. A great man -- Stephen Fry

Manifestly a genius, a comic surrealist genius and had no equal -- Terry Wogan

A totally original comedy writer -- Michael Palin

A legendary and iconic figure, Spike Milligan was born at Ahmednagar in India in 1918. He received his first education in a tent in the Hyderabad Sindh desert and graduated from there, through a series of Roman Catholic schools in India and England, to the Lewisham Polytechnic. He then plunged into the world of Show Business, seduced by his first stage appearance, at the age of eight, in the nativity play of his Poona convent school. He began his career as a band musician, but became famous as a humorous scriptwriter and actor in both films and broadcasting. Over the course of his astonishing career, he wrote over eighty books of fiction, memoir, poetry, plays, cartoons and children's stories. He was the creator, principal writer and performer of the infamous Goon Show, and went on to become one of the greatest and most influential comedians of the twentieth century. Spike received an honorary CBE in 1992 and Knighthood in 2000. He died in 2002.