"QUOTE...UNQUOTE" : NEW BOOKS

“QUOTE ... UNQUOTE”

NEW BOOKS AND E-BOOKS

I have just published a new book in hardback: from Batsford books, it is entitled Don’t You Know There’s a War On! and sub-titled Words and Phrases from the World Wars.

• From ‘Your country needs you’ to Churchill’s ‘Blood, toil, tears and sweat’, this fascinating book is a wide-ranging exploration of words and phrases from the two world wars.

• Covers phrases from both home and abroad, including military terms (‘dreadnought’), political slogans (‘a bayonet is a weapon with a worker at each end’), slang used by soldiers abroad (‘basket case’) and comic radio-show catchphrases (‘this is Funf speaking’).

• Packed with information on the provenance and development of these intriguing, quirky and sometimes crude phrases that were born out of times of conflict and have become part of our language.

My autobiography is only being published as an e-book – and here it is. I became ‘broadcasting-struck’ at a very early age but, although I maintained my ambition to go in to radio or television when I grew up, through school in Liverpool and at university in Oxford, I had no very clear idea of what I wanted to do if and when I got there. This is the story of how I eventually found out what I wanted to do in broadcasting – and how I found a way of doing it ...

Go to the Kindle store at amazon.com, amazon.co.uk or amazon.de for more details. A small note: you don’t actually have to have a Kindle to read Kindle e-books. You can download (for free) a ‘Kindle for PC’ program that lets you view the books on your PC screen and on other devices.

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My substantial tome A Word In Your Shell-Like is already available as a Kindle e-book and seems to be doing well. Accordingly, I have it in mind to produce Kindle editions of several on the backlist of my reference and other books. Apart from keeping the books available, it will also enable me to update them, correct them and generally revive them.

First out was a Kindle version of my five collections of humorous and pointed graffiti which, it is not an exaggeration to say, were a publishing phenomenon of the early 1980s and sold millions of copies. I have long wanted to produce a ‘complete graffiti’ book and now I have done so. Called The Golden Age of Graffiti, the e-book brings together the text of the five collections, more or less exactly as originally published. In addition there are photos from my archive of some of the major graffiti, background notes on the most famous ones, as well as thoughts on what has happened to the type of graffiti jokes and stuff that was so current back then but which has now all but disappeared under the spray-painted rubbish that bedaubs so many of our cities today. This e-book is available from the Kindle store at amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and amazon,de.

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Also available now are e-books by me, with the generic title The Best Guide to –––––

This is the biggest, best and funniest collection of humorous quotations you will find, embracing as it does over 5,000 comic utterances of all types: aphorisms and epigrams, retorts and putdowns, quips and one-liners, sayings and proverbs, together with examples of unintentional humour such as gaffes and malapropisms.

The quotations are drawn from a world-class cast of wits and humorists: comedians, novelists, playwrights, journalists, politicians, actors, songwriters and many others. Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Noël Coward and Woody Allen are, of course, well represented but hundreds of other exponents of the bon mot are included here, even if they have brightened the world with only one or two of their sayings.

Nigel Rees draws on over 35 years experience of sourcing quotations through his BBC Radio show Quote ... Unquote. This is not just another collection of funny sayings, it is the ultimate authority on who actually said what and is a major attempt to pin down the quotations that readers really want to know about. Using the search button you can find what you are looking for in The BEST GUIDE to HUMOROUS QUOTATIONS whether it be through a word or phrase or under one of the 1,200 thematic headings.

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And then:

From a database of some 10,000 quotes, I have selected a breathtakingly comprehensive and entertaining collection from all areas of cinema. Great and memorable lines from the movies are coupled with quotable comments by and about film-makers and film-goers. This specially revised e-book also celebrates the language of the movies – the catchphrases and titles, the slogans and clichés. Above all The Best Guide to Movie Quotes hears from the professionals – the actors, directors, producers, writers and critics – and tells us what they love, loathe and lament about the business, the pictures, the players – and about each other.

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I have also produced Kindle editions of the three novels that I wrote in the late 1980s. These were ‘popular’ – I didn’t mind people calling them ‘airport’ novels – and I enjoyed writing them enormously, even if I didn’t make a career out of it. The first two were, perhaps inevitably, based on my own experiences.

The Newsmakers told of a quartet of what we would now call ‘news presenters’ with a British all-news TV station. At the time, CNN had only just begun and there was no such British equivalent. So it was on the prophetic side – even if I somehow did not manage to predict the internet, nor the use of cell phones and satellite links in TV newsgathering ...

The second, called simply Talent, follows the fortunes of a trio of young people from Liverpool who make their way in what we would now call ‘the music business’ in the wake of the Beatles and all that.

The third, A Family Matter, was right outside my experience – telling a tale of a British aristocratic family trying to sort out its inheritance and also getting mixed up with some Sicilians whose notion of ‘the family’ was rather different.

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