Mussolini

His Part in My Downfall

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Summary

VOLUME FOUR OF SPIKE MILLIGAN'S LEGENDARY MEMOIRS IS A HILARIOUS, SUBVERSIVE FIRST-HAND ACCOUNT OF WW2

'Brilliant verbal pyrotechnics, throwaway lines and marvelous anecdotes' Daily Mail

'Desperately funny, vivid, vulgar' Sunday Times
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A voice is calling across the land, 'Bombardier Milligan.' 'Bombadier Milligan is dead,' I replied in a disguised voice. The voice replied, 'Then he's going to miss his breakfast.'

The fourth volume of Spike Milligan's legendary account of his time in the army during World War Two begins as he and his regiment land in sunny Italy in 1943 ('The ship touched the beach very gently, so gently I suspect it's not insured').

After a bout of Sandfly Fever, from which he soon recovers ('I'm ready to be killed again'), our plucky hero is piddled on by a farm dog ('Mussolini's revenge?') before forging his way inland towards the enemy and the sound of guns ('We're getting near civilisation'), where matters suddenly take a dark turn ('I was not really me any more') . . .
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'The most irreverent, hilarious book about the war that I have ever read' Sunday Express
'Milligan is the Great God to all of us' John Cleese

'The Godfather of Alternative Comedy' Eddie Izzard

'A totally original comedy writer' Michael Palin

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

Reviews

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

About the author

Spike Milligan

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.

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