In the original dustsheet. Grey cloth binding with silver title on the spine.

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Spike Milligan was one of our best-loved comics as well as one of our most original. In this first major assessment of Spike’s life and career, the highly respected biographer Humphrey Carpenter has – through copious research and access to many of those closest to the great man – unearthed a character who could be as difficult and contradictory as he was generous and talented.

Terence Alan “Spike” Milligan KBE (16 April 1918 – 27 February 2002) was an Irish] comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright and actor. The son of an English mother and Irish father, he was born in British India, where he spent his childhood before relocating in 1931 to England, where he lived and worked for the majority of his life. Disliking his first name, he began to call himself “Spike” after hearing the band Spike Jones and his City Slickers on Radio Luxembourg.

Milligan was the co-creator, main writer, and a principal cast member of the British radio comedy programme The Goon Show, performing a range of roles including the characters Eccles and Minnie Bannister. He was the earliest-born and last surviving member of the Goons. He took his success with The Goon Show into television with Q5, a surreal sketch show credited as a major influence on the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. He wrote and edited many books, including Puckoon (1963) and a seven-volume autobiographical account of his time serving during the Second World War, beginning with Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1971). He also wrote comical verse, with much of his poetry written for children, including Silly Verse for Kids (1959).

Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter (29 April 1946 – 4 January 2005) was an English biographer, writer, and radio broadcaster. He is known especially for his biographies of J. R. R. Tolkien and other members of the literary society the Inklings.

Early life: Carpenter was born (and lived almost all of his life, and died) in the city of Oxford, England. His father was Harry Carpenter, Bishop of Oxford. His mother was Urith Monica Trevelyan, who had training in the Fröbel teaching method. As a child, he lived in the Warden’s Lodgings at Keble College, Oxford, where his father served as warden until his appointment as Bishop of Oxford. He was educated at the Dragon School Oxford, and Marlborough College and then read English at Keble.
Non-fiction works: His biographies included J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977; also editing of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien), The Inklings: CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Charles Williams and their Friends (1978; winner of the 1978 Somerset Maugham Award), W. H. Auden (1981), Ezra Pound (1988; winner of the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize), Evelyn Waugh (1989), Benjamin Britten (1992), Robert Runcie (1997), Dennis Potter, and Spike Milligan (2004). He also authored Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (1987), and his last book The Seven Lives of John Murray (2008) about John Murray and the publishing house of Albemarle Street, was published posthumously. He also wrote histories of BBC Radio 3 (on which he had regular stints as broadcaster), the British satire boom of the 1960s, Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s (2002), and a centennial history of the Oxford University Dramatic Society in 1985. His encyclopedic work, The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (1984), written jointly with his wife, Mari Prichard, has become a standard reference source.
Children’s books: His Mr Majeika series of children’s books were adapted for television. The Joshers: Or London to Birmingham with Albert and Victoria (1977) is a children’s adventure book, similar in style to The Railway Children and based on the adventure of taking a working narrowboat up the Grand Union Canal from London to Birmingham.
Broadcasting: Carpenter began his broadcasting career at BBC Radio Oxford as a presenter and producer where he met Mari Prichard (whose father was Caradog Prichard, the Welsh novelist and poet); they married in 1973. They jointly produced A Thames Companion in 1975. He played a role in launching Radio 3’s arts discussion programme Night Waves and acted as a regular presenter of other programmes on the network including Radio 3’s afternoon drivetime programme In Tune and, until it was discontinued, its Sunday request programme Listeners’ Choice. Until his death, he presented the BBC Radio 4 biography series Great Lives recorded in Bristol. The last edition recorded before his death featured an interview with the singer Eddi Reader about the poet Robert Burns, the major focus of her creative work. BBC Radio 4 broadcast this programme on New Year’s Eve, 2004.
Jazz music and children’s drama: Carpenter was an amateur jazz musician who played the piano, the saxophone, and the double-bass, the last instrument professionally in a dance band in the 1970s. In 1983, he formed a 1930s style jazz band, Vile Bodies, which for many years enjoyed a residency at the Ritz Hotel in London. He also founded the Mushy Pea Theatre Group, a children’s drama group based in Oxford, which premiered his Mr Majeika: The Musical in 1991 and Babes, a musical about Hollywood child stars.
Death: Humphrey Carpenter died in 2005 of heart failure, compounded by the Parkinson’s disease from which he had suffered for several years. He was buried in Wolvercote Cemetery in Oxford, also the final resting place of J. R. R. Tolkien. A commemorative stained-glass window was installed in St Margaret’s Institute, Polstead Road, honouring Carpenter’s many accomplishments.