The Complete Henry Root Letters

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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. Henry Root, who made a fortune in wet fish, spent ten years in correspondence with powerful and famous people across Britain.

a b c "William Donaldson – Womanising satirist and novelist who squandered several fortunes on wild living". Donaldson's ghastly creation wrote outrageous, threatening, scurrilous and outlandish letters to public figures, praising, insulting or attempting to bribe them. The cheek and audacity of Henry Root leaps off the page and each anecdote is funnier and more preposterous than the last. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The sender of these letters – a cantankerous crusader against pornography and modernity, and for hanging and Mrs.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. This time around Root has written an appalling soap opera about the decline of moral standards in modern Britain and put together a new volume crammed with letters to famous actors, directors and other worthies up and down the land.

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. 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". com, who sent a letter to all US senators, posing as a child and asking them for their favourite joke. He completed his National Service in the Royal Navy in the late 1950s, reaching the rank of Sub-Lieutenant. His experiences there formed the basis of his first novel, Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen (1975).Esther Rantzen doesn't come out quite so well - there's a disagreement about whether the BBC should pay Root for some unusable script material, and Rantzen sends the same response to two different letters - the first from Root praising the show, the second, again thanking him and saying how much they appreciate viewer contributions is in response to his missive which says simply, "Dear Esther, You're a fat idiot and your show's a disgrace. In short, he was the British version of Sarah Palin – but people apparently took him seriously (with the exception of Cambridge). If further recommendation be needed, then surely there is none finer than Glenda Slagg/Linda Lee Potter: "About as funny as pushing somebody fully clothed into a swimming pool.