Josh Kilmer-Purcell lived a double life. By day, he was a successful young advertising executive. By night, he would trade in his corporate uniform for high heels & sequins, & perform in downtown New York nightclubs as a drag queen called Acquadisiac before returning to the uptown penthouse he shared with his crack-addicted male escort boyfriend. In this powerfully written, emotional rollercoaster of a memoir, Kilmer-Purcell blends the glittering & highly dramatic world of nightclubs, drugs & drag with a soulful & ironic perspective on his own journey through love & life.

Told with a raw & honest voice that conveys hard truths with unflinching courage, I Am Not Myself These Days is a stunningly witty & ultimately deeply moving tour de force by a remarkable new talent.

...

In 1989, Tim Moore moved into the last house in Chiswick with an outside toilet. Intrigued by a subsequent encounter with an elderly former resident, he finds himself inspired to travel back to the land before now, experiencing the hardships & homespun pleasures enjoyed & endured by Moores gone by.

The journey that follows takes him through the world of historical re-enactment, sitting at the feet of retromaniacs who have seen their future in the past, & learning their singular ways. Living on bramble leaves, Johnny cake & porridge, Moore travels from the Iron Age to the Steam Age, from Roman legionary, Tudor master to Yankee spy, sharing straw beds & daft hats with period obsessives driven by socio-historical curiosity, disillusionment with the pampered fecklessness of the modern world, or a simple nostalgia for campfires, flatulence & brutality.

I Believe in Yesterday is an odyssey through 2, 000 years of filth & fury, where men were men, the nights were black, the world was your outside toilet & everything tasted faintly of leeks.



...

In 1989, Tim Moore moved into the last house in Chiswick with an outside toilet. Intrigued by a subsequent encounter with an elderly former resident, & shamed to confess the phobic haste with which he demolished this facility, he finds himself inspired to travel back to the land before now, experiencing the horny-handed hardships & homespun pleasures enjoyed & endured by Moores gone by.

The journey that follows takes him through the world of historical re-enactment, sitting at the bare & grubby feet of retromaniacs who have seen their future in the past, & learning their singular ways. Living on bramble leaves, Johnny cake & porridge, Moore travels from the Iron Age to the Steam Age, sharing straw beds & daft hats with period obsessives driven by socio-historical curiosity, disillusionment with the pampered fecklessness of the modern world, or a simple nostalgia for campfires, flatulence & brutality.

As a Roman legionary, Moore is put to the Gaulish sword twelve times a day for the entertainment of the Danish public; as master of a Tudor manor's domestic staff, he works his young charges to heatstroked collapse, & serves up moat-drowned hare to the sneering gentry. He crosses the snake-happy Kentucky wilderness with a Vietnam veteran & his ox-drawn wagon, gets arrested as a Yankee spy in the Louisiana no man's l&, & lets a party of taunting French schoolchildren have it with a medieval bazooka. Along the way he meets living historians for whom authenticity means pulling their own teeth out & dyeing outfits in urine, & those who stride back through time with a Nokia & a packet of fags stuffed down their codpiece.

I Believe in Yesterday is an odyssey through 2, 000 years of filth & fury, where men were men, the nights were black, the world was your outside toilet & everything tasted faintly of leeks.





...

In 1989, Tim Moore moved into the last house in Chiswick with an outside toilet. Intrigued by a subsequent encounter with an elderly former resident, he finds himself inspired to travel back to the land before now, experiencing the hardships & homespun pleasures enjoyed & endured by Moores gone by.

The journey that follows takes him through the world of historical re-enactment, sitting at the feet of retromaniacs who have seen their future in the past, & learning their singular ways. Living on bramble leaves, Johnny cake & porridge, Moore travels from the Iron Age to the Steam Age, from Roman legionary, Tudor master to Yankee spy, sharing straw beds & daft hats with period obsessives driven by socio-historical curiosity, disillusionment with the pampered fecklessness of the modern world, or a simple nostalgia for campfires, flatulence & brutality.

I Believe in Yesterday is an odyssey through 2, 000 years of filth & fury, where men were men, the nights were black, the world was your outside toilet & everything tasted faintly of leeks.



...

On 29 March 1945 Orwell's wife Eileen died, aged 39. Her last long, very moving letters to her husband are printed here. Less than six months later the novel that she might be said to have nurtured & which gave Orwell world-wide fame, Animal Farm, was published. For a little over three months Orwell worked as a War Correspondence for The Observer & the Manchester Evening News. As well as 74 books specifically reviewed, many others were discussed briefly in essays & in her column ' As I Please'. ' Politics & the English Language, one of Orwell's most important essays, was immediately reprinted for journalists of The Observer & News of the World as a guide to tood writing. His defence of P. G. Wodehouse, printed here, was written at a time when Wodehouse was still under a cloud. Essays & articles wrote for The Observer, Manchester Evening News & Evening Standard are reprinted; correspondence shows he had written the first twelve pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Eileen's will & Orwell's first notes for his literary executor are also reproduced. Orwell kept a careful account of what he earned to assist in making his income tax return. Only one such record has survived (for 12 July 1943 to 31 December 1945) & it is reproduced here, fully annotated. ...

A doctor in America has just invented a 'sperm sorting machine'. At least that's what he claimed when his receptionist burst into the office to find him doing something peculiar with the Hoover attachment. Apparently the system used for separating the male & female sperm is remarkably simple. A sample is placed in the petri dish with a microscopic pile of household items on a tiny staircase. All the sperm that go straight past without picking anything up are obviously boys.

John O' Farrell's first collection of columns GLOBAL VILLAGE IDIOT was a huge success prompting fulsome praise from such major public figures as the Queen Mother, Roy Jenkins & Cardinal Hume. Sadly, since their deaths, their glowing endorsements cannot be officially verified. So here instead is another collection of funny, satirical essays on a hundred & one 21st century subjects. Read how the government plans to introduce ' Santa loans' that will leave school children £10, 000 in debt for all the presents that used to be free from Father Christmas. Learn how the EU is being expanded to include Narnia. & did you know that American war planes now have a little sticker on the back saying ' How's my bombing?' with an 0800 number to call if they blow up any Muslim country in a discourteous of aggressive manner...

...

A doctor in America has just invented a 'sperm sorting machine'. At least that's what he claimed when his receptionist burst into the office to find him doing something peculiar with the Hoover attachment. Apparently the system used for separating the male & female sperm is remarkably simple. A sample is placed in the petri dish with a microscopic pile of household items on a tiny staircase. All the sperm that go straight past without picking anything up are obviously boys.

John O' Farrell's first collection of columns GLOBAL VILLAGE IDIOT was a huge success prompting fulsome praise from such major public figures as the Queen Mother, Roy Jenkins & Cardinal Hume. Sadly, since their deaths, their glowing endorsements cannot be officially verified. So here instead is another collection of funny, satirical essays on a hundred & one 21st century subjects. Read how the government plans to introduce ' Santa loans' that will leave school children £10, 000 in debt for all the presents that used to be free from Father Christmas. Learn how the EU is being expanded to include Narnia. & did you know that American war planes now have a little sticker on the back saying ' How's my bombing?' with an 0800 number to call if they blow up any Muslim country in a discourteous of aggressive manner...

...

Do you want to be happier? Do you want to stop feeling bad right now? Do you want to experience greater joy than ever before? ...