A hard-headed but often hilarious guide to the pleasures and pitfalls of travel by one of Britain's favourite writers.

Gambler, journalist, fervent alcoholic and four-times married Jeffrey Bernard writes the "Low Life" column for the Spectator magazine chronicling Soho life as well as offering a very personal philosophy on vodka, women and race-courses. From this, Keith Waterhouse has brilliantly constructed a play (the title being the euphemism used by the Spectator when Bernard is incapable of writing his column) which is set in the saloon bar of Bernard's favourite Soho pub, the Coach and Horses. Having passed out in the lavatory, Bernard awakes in the early hours of the morning to find himself alone and...

A teenager in a North Country town, Billy Fisher weaves a world of his own out of his day dreams. He is an incurable liar, idle and dishonest, and to escape from his dull job as an undertaker's clerk and his dreary domestic background he imagines himself in so many different situations that truth and fiction become hopelessly intermingled. His family is unable to understand or control him, though they realize that he is a good for nothing. The cast is completed by the three girls to whom he is simultaneously engaged. When he is given the chance to start a new life, he turns it down,...

There is a Happy Land tells of the events of a few weeks in the life of a small boy on a north county council estate and the rhubarb fields, quarries and Clerk of Works yard that are his playground. Unlike most boys portrayed in fiction he is not an ultrasensitive soul but an ordinary boy, occasionally cowardly, sometimes a liar, tough in his own eyes and often insecure in his dealings with others. In his evocation of the jingles, games, fantasies and nightmares of childhood, Waterhouse brings his tribe of street urchins so vividly to life that the book has taken on the status of a much-loved...