Halfway To Hollywood

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What to expect

Michael Palin's bestselling diaries of the 1980s.

After a live performance at the Hollywood Bowl, The Pythons made their last performance together in 1983 in the hugely successful MONTY PYTHON'S MEANING OF LIFE. Writing and acting in films and television then took over much of Michael's life, culminating in the smash hit A FISH CALLED WANDA (for which he won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor), and the first of his seven celebrated television journeys for the BBC. He co-produced, wrote and played the lead in THE MISSIONARY opposite Maggie Smith, who also appeared with him in A PRIVATE FUNCTION, written by Alan Bennett.

Such was his fame in the US, he was enticed into once again hosting the enormously popular show Saturday Night Live, in one edition of which his mother makes a highly successful surprise guest appearance. He filmed several journeys for television and became chairman of the pressure group, Transport 2000. His family remains a constant as his and Helen's children enter their teens.

Critics Review

Palin reminds me of Samuel Johnson: driven, intellectually formidable, and spurred on by self-reproach and the wholly irrational idea that he's not really getting on with it . . . Palin is a seriously good writer. These diaries are full of fine phrases and sharp little sketches of scenes
DAILY MAIL
This is a brisk, pithy, amusing read, teeming with the writer's inner life, crammed with high-quality observations . . . and deft ink-pen sketches of his associates
SPECTATOR
Charming and vastly entertaining
IRISH TIMES
His entries are riddled with the astute wit and generosity of spirit that characterise both his performances and his previously published writing
TIME OUT, 'Book of the Week'
It's clear why Cleese later nominated Palin as his luxury item on Desert Island Discs . . . he makes such unfailingly good company . . . this is the agreeably written story of how a former Python laid the foundation stone by which he would reinvent himself as a public institution: the People's Palin
GUARDIAN
A fascinating and wry cultural take on the 1980s . . . it's also, when added to volume one, proving to be the most beguiling and revealing of ongoing autobiographies
SUNDAY HERALD
This is the Michael Palin with whom the public has fallen in love. A man whose ordinary likeability makes us feel we know him, and that he is incapable of nastiness or an outburst of bad temper
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
There are some fabulous and very funny snippets about Alan Bennett and Maggie Smith . . . the behind-the-scenes antics of the Pythons and their wider circle make great reading
OBSERVER

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