Hanif Kureishi offers an insight into the birth of a writer - himself - through this memoir that conjures up a family story of how he found his own literary calling from the ashes of his father's failed attempts in the past even as the world turned upside down and India split in two along religious lines.
Joseph Tremaine Ellington, now 57 years old, has long abandoned his former career as an enquiry agent for the safety of teaching. But his inescapable obligation to an old friend, a man he deeply respects, keeps bringing him back like a moth to a flame.
In this, the first of Spike Milligan's uproarious recollections of life in the army, our hero takes us from the outbreak of war in 1939 ('it must be something we said'), through his attempts to avoid enlistment ('time for my appendicitus, I thought') and his gunner training in Bexhill ('there was one ...
