George Mikes – författare

A complete guide to the British Way of Life. If you're British, you'll love it. If you're not, you'll recognise it._______Born in Hungary, George Mikes spent more than forty years in the Britain observing behaviours and misbehaviours of local and foreign Brits.Queuing: "An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one."How to plan a town: "Street names should be painted clearly and distinctly on large boards. Then hide these boards carefully."Sex: "Continental people have sex lives: the English have hot water bottles."With essential chapters such as "How to Avoid Travelling", "In Praise of Television", "On Not Complaining" and "How to Panic Quietly", they’ll get to know Britain like never before with this fun and informative gift!_______WHAT READERS ARE SAYING:'Got me in tears of laughter''Hilarious and informative essays about the British way of life' 'So many people have tried to describe the English mentality . . . This book is as near as you can get!''Laugh-out-loud hilarious, witty and insightful

George Mikes says, 'the English have no soul; they have the understatement instead.' But they do have a sense of humour - they provide it by buying over three hundred thousand copies of a book that took them quietly and completely apart, a book that really took the Mikes out of them.

George Mikes has written many successful books on a variety of interesting subjects, but one so successful as those on the subject most central to his own experience: his adopted country. The first of these came out in 1946: the ever famous "How to be an Alien." Later he enlarges the picture with "How to be inimitable" and "How to be Decadent." All three books were illustrated by the master of the cartoonists’ art, the late Nicolas Bentley. Here they are, all in one volume, which will make life much easier for today's would-be Brits than it was for those who pervaded them. It is said that a few of the latter actually failed to become indistinguishable from the genuine British article because they found it too tiresome to seek out three separate books: a misfortune that need never again occur to anyone.

'To write a book is hard; to write a funny book is harder; to write a funny book both wise and funny is the prerogative of Mr. Mikes' The Times_________________________If you want to succeed here you must be able to handle the English sense of humour.So proclaims George Mikes' timeless exploration of this curious phenomenon. Whether it's understatement, self-deprecation or plain cruelty, the three elements he identifies as essential to our sense of humour, being witty here is a way of life.Perfectly placed as an adopted Englishman himself, Mikes delivers his shrewd advice - helpfully divided into 'Theory' and 'Practice' - with a comic precision that does his chosen country proud. Drawing on a trove of examples from our rich comic canon, from Orwell ("Every joke is a tiny revolution") to Oscar Wilde, this is the essential handbook for natives and foreigners alike.Mrs Kennedy: "I don't think, Mr Churchill, that I have told you anything about my grandchildren."Winston Churchill: "For which, madam, I am infinitely grateful."

First published in 1963, the original blurb reads: "This may be a unique generation, which has so widely felt the full range of suffering. It is common in London or New York to spend evenings in the company of people who were prisoners of the Japanese, of Hitler, of the Hungarian Communists – or of their own stress and breakdown. Prison, in some form, is the symbol of it.This is an attempt to discover what has been learnt of this whole range of prison experience – taking prison to be any form of enforced separation from the world of normal life. Thus there are chapters on mental asylum and hospital, as well as political prison and concentration camp. And the emphasis is on the return rather than the experience. What is the lesson of that time of separation? Having travelled to the end of fear, was it the death of fear – or its exposure? That is the question each author was invited to answer."

First published in 1963, the original blurb reads: "This may be a unique generation, which has so widely felt the full range of suffering. It is common in London or New York to spend evenings in the company of people who were prisoners of the Japanese, of Hitler, of the Hungarian Communists – or of their own stress and breakdown. Prison, in some form, is the symbol of it.This is an attempt to discover what has been learnt of this whole range of prison experience – taking prison to be any form of enforced separation from the world of normal life. Thus there are chapters on mental asylum and hospital, as well as political prison and concentration camp. And the emphasis is on the return rather than the experience. What is the lesson of that time of separation? Having travelled to the end of fear, was it the death of fear – or its exposure? That is the question each author was invited to answer."

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