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Jan 16, 2025 | 
dailymail.co.uk | Roger Lewis
A SECOND ACT: WHAT NEARLY DYING TEACHES US ABOUT REALLY LIVING by Dr Matt Morgan (Simon & Schuster £20, 272pp)This is the scariest book I have ever read in my entire life – because it is about my death. Dr Matt Morgan, a top consultant in an intensive care unit, tells us that out of any 100 people who suffer a cardiac arrest outside of hospital, only ten will reach hospital alive.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
dailymail.co.uk | Roger Lewis
My family have been farming in Glamorganshire since 1868, and I absolutely hated it. It was (and is) a non-stop grind of lambing and calving, shearing, milking, weaning, slaughtering. The sole entertainment, now hunting is banned, is watching the vet push his arm up a cow’s bottom, just like in TV’s James Herriot programmes. No wonder I turned my back on this thankless world, with its never-ending drudgery, preferring to sit indoors watching old black and white films and writing books.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
theoldie.co.uk | Roger Lewis
By Roger Lewis
Golden Oldie of the Silver Screen Award
Mike Leigh
Abortion, alcoholism, unemployment, obesity, old age, nagging wives, boorish husbands, domestic violence:
Mike Leigh’s subjects ought to be depressing, but for some reason his films are uplifting – and this is because of the quality of the acting. Leigh is one of our greatest living directors.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
dailymail.co.uk | Roger Lewis
Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women by Joan Smith (William Collins £22, 292 pp)Libertines always receive hearty cheers, e.g. Jilly Cooper’s heroes with their non-stop rogering. Women who enjoy sex, however, are immediately dubbed sluts, slags, whores, and nymphos – so they must be suppressed, controlled or otherwise denied a free, independent existence. It was ever thus.
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Nov 9, 2024 | 
dailymail.co.uk | Roger Lewis
Since reading this searing book I have been afraid to move – the slightest human action is evidently fraught with danger, risking hospitalisation and paralysis. During his year or so as an inpatient, Hanif Kureishi was on a ward with people who’d suffered near-fatal mishaps tripping over a garden rake, falling out of bed, toppling off a chair while reaching up to water a pot plant and tumbling down the stairs.
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Oct 27, 2024 | 
dailymail.co.uk | Roger Lewis
The Closest Thing To Crazy by Mike Batt (Nine Eight Books £22, 368pp)Actually, I’ve got a dog called Womble,’ said Mike Batt’s greatest fan, the late Queen Elizabeth II. She also loved his song The Closest Thing To Crazy, which Terry Wogan regularly played on Radio Two, whilst Her Majesty was eating her breakfast.
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Oct 26, 2024 | 
dailymail.co.uk | Roger Lewis
By Mike Batt (Nine Eight Books £22, 368pp)'Actually, I've got a dog called Womble,' said Mike Batt's greatest fan, the late Queen Elizabeth II. She also loved his song The Closest Thing To Crazy, which Terry Wogan regularly played on Radio Two, whilst Her Majesty was eating her breakfast. Batt was invited to compose music for the Queen and Prince Philip's Golden Wedding Anniversary, which was performed by the massed bands of the Coldstream, Grenadier, Scots, Irish and Welsh guards.
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
dailymail.co.uk | Roger Lewis
THE BOOKSHOP, THE DRAPER, THE CANDLESTICK MAKER: A HISTORY OF THE HIGH STREET by Annie Gray (Profile Books £22, 404pp)Recently– and after half a century – I revisited Newport in South Wales, where I’d spent my youth. It presented a sorry scene. The once-grand Westgate Hotel – all Victorian ballrooms and wrought iron balustrades – has been shuttered up for two decades and is covered in moss. The old shops and chain stores (M&S, Woolies, Debenhams) have gone. Pubs have gone. The cattle market has gone.
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Oct 7, 2024 | 
dailymail.co.uk | Roger Lewis
Last week, to add to my established woes of pancreas and heart trouble, I was told I have something called an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Or anyway I had to attend a 'routine' screening appointment, and after the nurse had poked her ultrasound gadget around my big belly for what seemed like ages, a decision was made (smilingly) to refer me onwards to a vascular consultant.
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Oct 4, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Roger Lewis
There’s sordid atmosphere aplenty when it comes to postwar Notting Hill, at that time a slum district in which the house of horrors at 10 Rillington Place was situated. In The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place, Kate Summerscale describes with relish the dilapidated stucco terraces, derelict factories, cheap commercial hotels and bleak lodgings, with rented rooms suitable for Philip Larkin’s Mr Bleaney containing a bed, a wardrobe, a jug and basin, a chair and a frying pan.
