The Complete Henry Root Letters

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He completed his National Service in the Royal Navy in the late 1950s, reaching the rank of Sub-Lieutenant. M Godding Books Ltd is an internet book business running from Wiltshire and sending books all over the world every working day. Donaldson lived at 139 Elm Park Mansions on Park Walk, Chelsea, London SW10, from which address all the Root letters were sent. You Cannot Live As I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This: The thoroughly disgraceful life and times of Willie Donaldson. H. Rochester Sneath - the fictional headmaster of the fictional British public school Selhurst, created by Humphry Berkeley.

I love this book and his laugh out style at trying to rankle celebrities and people in the public eye. It is very non PC and there is a wave of guilt that I should find it amusing, but nevertheless it is a good read. The millions who enjoyed the original 'Root' will no doubt have assumed that such a public and hysterical scam could never be repeated.

It consists of real correspondence between an apparently wealthy and eccentric retired fish-merchant, and many public figures to whom he wrote, requesting support for bizarre right-wing proposals. This single volume brings together "The Henry Root Letters" and "The Further Letters of Henry Root". This book is a compendium of actual letters which the author wrote to all kinds of people of note - all from his persona of some kind of hard core petite bourgeoise British citizen. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Jean Rook's reply "I am certainly not a thinking man's Anna Raeburn, so you must solve your own problems.

Supposedly a wet fish merchant from Fulham, he is an avatar for a lot of the to-the-right-of-Attila-the-Hun, Thatcher-supporting, mildly racist, entitled, liberal-baiting mansplaining that was de rigeur and absolutely unchallenged in the Spectator/Private Eye yachts and casinos circles that Donaldson frequented. Together, they provide a powerful impression of what life must have been like in late-Seventies Britain for a retired trader in wet fish, seeing his country overrun by lesbians, lefties and other losers. The letters aren’t really dated, with the exception of certain BBC television stars and the one to the South African Ambassador. The cheek and audacity of Henry Root leaps off the page and each anecdote is funnier and more preposterous than the last.The phenomenal success of the Henry Root books, especially the first, enabled Donaldson to resume his earlier chaotic lifestyle, and in the mid-1980s he began using crack cocaine. Donaldson's third marriage, in 1986, was to Cherry Hatrick, who survived him; they separated six months after their marriage. The sender of these letters – a cantankerous crusader against pornography and modernity, and for hanging and Mrs. Donaldson's biographical survey of roguish Britons through the ages, Brewer's Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics (2002), has been described as "a breathtaking triumph of misdirected scholarship". By the way , reading the Private Eye magazine I can't help comparing it's "styles" with those incredible originals scripts, written by Henry Moor.

Back in 1979, people with too much time on their hands could send actual letters to leading politicians, judges and other luminaries of light entertainment, and expect a reply.He was educated at Winchester College (where he first met Julian Mitchell) and Magdalene College, Cambridge. His heroes were few, but those who were, to Root's mind, "sound" - principally Mrs Thatcher, the Dowager Lady Birdwood and James Anderton, "God's Cop", the self-appointed guardian of Greater Manchester's morals.