Box 18

A major event in humour publishing as a wide range of Spike Milligan's unpublished work is brought into the public domain for the first time in a stunningly produced volume. The two previous anthologies, 'The Essential Spike Milligan' and 'The Compulsive Spike Milligan', brought together the very best of his stories, cartoons, poems and correspondence, and reminded his fans how deserved his reputation was as a wildly inventive and original comedian. 'The Unpublished Spike Milligan' - chosen and edited by Norma Farnes, Milligan's manager, biographer and close friend - is yet more essential and compulsive than these first two collections. It consists of the contents of 'Box 18', a file into which the highly prolific Spike would put his writing and drawings as they came to him, but which never came to be published. The book also draws on previously unseen diaries and letters. As both an original anthology and a personal legacy from a long-gone era, this is absolutely unmissable.