Her voice lit up Radio 4's News Quiz, she was brilliant on QI and she tirelessly travelled the UK as one of the most respected and loved comics on the circuit.' STEPHEN FRYStephen Fry spoke for much of middle England when he responded to the news of Linda Smith's tragic death of cancer, aged 48, earlier this year. Linda was the brilliant mainstay of Radio 4's The News Quiz, Just a Minute, and I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue for many years. She was just establishing her career on TV through blistering performances on Have I Got News for You, QI and Room 101, when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.Linda was one of the few women to conquer the male dominated world of comedy and she had the wit and the charm to win over millions of male and female fans in equal measure. She had an eye for the absurdities of modern life and loved to prick the egos of the pompous and the vain. She could be savage about the people she despised too. When she spoke of the "dead devil-eyes of Nicky Campbell" she meant it. When she called David Mellor, "the thinking woman's fat ugly bastard", she meant it even more. When she called David Blunkett "Satan's bearded folk singer", it was a simple statement of fact. No wonder then Linda was voted the 'wittiest person alive' by Radio 4 listeners in 2002.In this brilliant anthology, we go right back to the start of Linda's career and re-live her very best material from the picket lines of the Miners' Strike, to the Edinburgh Festival and on to her mainstream success on BBC radio and TV, and as touring comedian loved up and down the country. The Very Best of Linda Smith is being compiled and edited by her partner of twenty-three years, Warren Lakin. The book also carries contributions from her extensive fan club including: Paul Merton, Graham Norton, Clive Anderson, Bill Bailey, Jo Brand, Alan Davies, Jack Dee, Dawn French, Stephen Fry, Tony Hawks, Eddie Izzard, Matt Lucas, Nicholas Parsons and Alexei Sayle amongst others. It will be the must-have gift for comedy fans and Radio 4 listeners this Christmas.

    

    We were inundated with thousands of disgusterous entries! To discover our winners, we waded through burps, farts and rotten eggs; bogies, vile stew and goo to find the funniest and most revolting specimens. This eBook contains the crème de la phlegm-hand picked by children's author, songwriter and McFly frontman, Tom Fletcher, and Wales's Children's Poet Laureate, Anni Llyn.A huge thank you to our revolting partners Puffin Books, the National Literacy Trust, Literature Wales, Magic Light, and the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre for all their help and support!

    He has, however, been a disappointment to his family in several ways: In appearance he is insignificant looking both in face and figure; he went to the University of Florida instead of Harvard where his forbears had been mainstays of the varsity crew for generations, and he studied agriculture instead of pointing himself toward a career in banking, bonds, or law. To say the least he is not apparently the stuff from which heroes are fashioned.As an agricultural expert specializing in fruit farming, Arthur becomes a Peace Corps volunteer and is assigned to the Republic of San Marco in the Caribbean. This weak-chinned Don Quixote soon acquires his Sancho Panza in the person of a rascally eleven-year-old boy, Pepe, who makes a bargain to be paid 400 pesos each time he saves Arthur's life. (The payments mount alarmingly!)The island's dictator thinks he can use Arthur to obtain military supplies with which to wipe out the band of guerillas in the hills who oppose his corrupt dictatorship. Failing in this the dictator decides to murder Goodpasture and cause an international incident by blaming it on the guerillas. This, he reasons, will bring the U.S. in to help stamp out the rebels.This plan also backfires (with Pepe's help, of course) and Goodpasture is taken prisoner and when they see he is a harmless eccentric he is appointed chief cook for the guerillas. From then on Arthur's life becomes a series of misadventures through which he moves serenely and from which he generally emerges unscathed (again with Pepe's assistance) until he surprisingly finds himself the guerillas' leader.Following one of the funniest bloodless revolutions imaginable Arthur Peabody Goodpasture ends up as Arthur el Gavilan, the new dictator of San Marco. "His strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure."

    With these characters William will make us laugh and cry. And never again will we think that someone is just a regular bloke - everyone can be a king or a queen in their own suburb.

    You'll find Jim in the same place every week, failing to organise a bunch of lads into something resembling a team while on the far side of the park his opposite number, a wannabe Mourinho in brashly monogrammed tracksuit, struts the sidelines, shouting - always shouting. This is the hilarious story of Jim White's time as manager of his son's football team: the highs, the lows, and the dog turd in the centre circle. At this level, winning spirit is not so much about passion, pride and belief as praying that your star centre forward has remembered his boots. Most importantly, it's about the enduring relationship between fathers, sons and football. This is the story no one who has ever watched his or her child play sport will want to miss.

    Forget the textbook theory now and settle down for what amounts to an eavesdrop into their girlie chats.

    One day he would mature into an award-winning man of business*, thriving entrepreneur and glittering member of the jet-set. A force of nature, a man who beat the odds, if only for a bit. This is his story. The story of Derek 'Del Boy' Trotter. Who else could tell the glorious tale of rags to riches to rags to rich(ish) but the man himself? You've heard of The Wolf of Wall Street, now meet the Pug of Peckham.*Trotter's Independent Traders, employee of the year 1982 - 2003

    Twirty-Something: A Young Woman's Guide to Giant Underwear is a hilarious new Kindle Single from Award-Winning and Amazon Best-Selling author and humorist Ingrid Reinke.On the cold January day when Ingrid Reinke turned 30, she looked back upon the last decade of her life in deep thought before finally shaking her head and mumbling to herself the following insight: "Wow, what a shit show."So, she sat down, braless and alone, and penned a collection of laugh-out-loud essays about the ridiculous, shocking and occasionally horrifying things that happen to us as we ungracefully age from 20 to 30, try, semi-successfully, to leave our clueless years behind and become mature, responsible grown-up women.From weird hairs to boob sweat, OCD to weddings, Twirty-Something swings between a no-holds-barred conversation and a cautionary tale about aging and all the crap that comes along with it.Sometime instruction manual, sometime commiseration partner, get ready for Reinke's honest and occasionally potty-mouthed accounts of this tumultuous decade.So hike up your yoga pants, plop another ice cube in your Pinot Grigio and get ready to laugh at the author, young women in general, and most of all at yourself.

    The ton explodes with malicious gossip.Where did Phoebe’s mysterious riches come from? Everyone wants to know—and so does she. But too many people in her glittering new world aren’t who they seem to be. And then there’s the confusing behavior of handsome Captain Anthony Grenville—the man who once ruined her.With scandalous rumors flying, Phoebe can’t afford to succumb to passion again. But can the newly-minted Heiress of Holborn discover the truth about her fortune... before her secret enemies can ruin her life?

    Kevin Carver is a household name. A popular TV soap star, he’s coasting through life in the same semi-detached, slightly smug way he’s always done. But when he dumps his much-too-young-for-him girlfriend in the same callous way he’s come to treat those around him, he makes the first in a series of mistakes. One poor decision leads to another and, as Kevin wades deeper into a moral grey area, things go from bad to very much worse. The national treasure finds himself the subject of vitriolic press attacks, a police investigation, and so much public loathing he begins to wonder if he has any chance of receiving justice. As the line blurs between his own life and that of the character he plays on TV, Kevin must face the consequences of his actions if he is ever to right his sinking ship. The Star Witness is the story of one self-regarding man’s descent into disgrace and his journey back to join the human race. A pin-sharp satire on the shallows of modern media culture and the dysfunctional relationship we all have with the idea of ‘celebrity’, it will keep you laughing, cringing and guessing until the very last page.

    Virgil Marcel is flying to London as a guest of the ancient and mysterious Everlasting Club. Virgil is the obnoxious, spoiled rotten son of Frank Marcel, founder of the Golden Boy chain, Howard Johnson-like restaurants in California; the only work he's done since college is to revamp his father's one fancy restaurant, now the last word in L.A. chic. In London, a black chauffeur, Butterworth, drives Virgil blindfolded to the club, where his host Kingsley, an upper-class twit, explains the club's tradition of ``indulging in excess.'' Virgil eats and drinks with the same swinish abandon as the other members, all male, but gets into trouble when he French-kisses the naked girl who is the motionless table decoration. So begins this story of gastronomic and erotic debauch; Nicholson cuts between England (where Virgil will be kidnapped by the sexy dinner-table centerpiece, then rescued by the God-fearing Butterworth) and California, where Frank, in the course of investigating his wife's supposed infidelity, discovers his prized chef Leo ejaculating into the sauces. Nicholson sustains a tone of campy menace (by now there's a whiff of cannibalism in the air) as he brings all these characters to London in a plot that zigs and zags entertainingly, though with increasing improbability. Even more troubling, though, are the factual accounts of gastronomic and other excesses interspersed throughout. Aside from the borderline tackiness of linking those notorious modern cannibals, the Andean crash survivors, to the high jinks of the club, these passages suggest authorial obsessions run amok. Spicy fare, though some may find the aftertaste disagreeable.

    The Robinson Family -- mother, father, two teenage sons and a six-year-old daughter who is everyone's favourite -- are a typical Christian family -- or are they?.

    Which disasters are often indulgently plotted by his aristocratic partners His Amazing Grace Basil Nectarine and the languid Binky. But more frequently caused by Schultz's desperate need to seduce as many beautiful women as is humanly possible and then more.Meanwhile fighting furiously in the battle for bachelordom and in an unquenchable quest for the soothing balm of box-office riches embellished by a beautiful woman who will sock him in the spiritual solar-plexus...

    His charming, humane, and side-splitting stories brought the trials and triumphs of Dave, Morley, Sam, and Stephanie to life, and made their memorable circle of friends, family, and neighbours as real as our own.This collection is both timely and timeless, a rich celebration of Stuart McLean's inimitable voice, and of the importance of love, community, kindness, and the healing power of laughter.