Luvvies. Tyrannical directors. Useless agents. Less job security than an England football manager. Who’d be an actor?Michael Simkins isn’t sure, even though he’s been one himself for over thirty years. Join him backstage as he examines that business called showbusiness, from am dram to Hollywood, and from Shakespeare to ads for flatulence pills.In a career that started as a plump teenager in ballet tights at RADA, Michael has appeared in countless West End ...

Though happy enough with his lot, Michael Simkins has never truly shaken the nagging doubt - helpfully upheld by his partner Julia - that he somehow lacks worldly sophistication. While she spent her teenage years as a nanny on a boat moored at Cannes, his utter lack of travel experience (Weymouth, Cleethorpes and a day trip to Dieppe) still has the power to shock people into leaving dinner parties early.So as he hits middle-age, Michael takes up the challenge of broadening his hori...

A fat boy with a passion for sweets and a loathing for games, the young Michael Simkins finds in cricket a sport where size doesn't necessarily matter and a full-blown obsession is born. Now in middle-age, he still harbours the somewhat deluded belief that the England middle-order might usefully benefit from his hard-earned skills. From impromptu Test series played with his dad in the family sweetshop through to his years running a team of dysfunctional inadequates, Fatty Batter i...

As a boy, Michael Simkins always wanted to be someone. While his friends were out getting laid and stoned, he was tucked up at home dreaming of his name in lights, of holding an audience rapt, of perhaps becoming a TV heart-throb, or having someone, anyone, ask for his autograph in the supermarket. This is the true story of an obsessive pursuit of acting fame. It is a life marked by occasional hard-fought successes and routine helpings of ritual humiliation: scout hut Gilbert and Sullivan,...

Michael Simkins is the ultimate Sunday cricketer - passionate, obsessive, technically inept, and hopelessly deluded. When an injury rules him out of an entire season, not only might it spell the end of his long career, he is faced more immediately with a summer aimlessly wandering garden centres and listening to The Archers.He decides instead to set off on an odyssey across the counties of England in search of that golden time in his youth when his passion for the game was...

The year AD 122 was the first time a Roman Emperor had set foot in the Province of Britannia since the invasion in AD 43.No doubt he had read many reports concerning the damage caused by marauding tribesmen crossing from what is now Scotland into the Province. Hadrian, therefore, decided - in the words of his biographer - 'to build a wall to separate the Romans from the Barbarians'.This engaging work from author Michael Simkins explores in depth the organis...

Michael Simkins' immensely charming stage adaptation of Dear Lupin, the witty and touching collection of letters from a father to his son that became a huge bestseller, winner of The Sunday Times Humour Book of the Year.Roger Mortimer's hilarious, touching, and always generous letters to his son, Charlie, are packed with crisp anecdotes and sharp observations. Spanning twenty-five years, their correspondence forms a memoir of their relationship, and an affectionate portrai...

Published to coincide with the anniversary of the First World War, this edition, superbly illustrated with contemporary photographs and colour maps, gives readers an insight into all aspects of the First World War, from the trenches to the Eastern Front, as well as the Mediterranean conflict.Raging for over four years across the tortured landscapes of Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the First World War changed the face of warfare forever. Characterised by slow,...

The idea that Japanese art is produced through rote copy and imitation is an eighteenth-century colonial construct, with roots in Romantic ideals of originality. Offering a much-needed corrective to this critique, Michael Lucken demonstrates the distinct character of Japanese mimesis and its dynamic impact on global culture, showing through several twentieth-century masterpieces the generative and regenerative power of Japanese arts.Choosing a representative work from each of four ...

Letters, Laughter and all the things we leave unsaid...'wonderful, moving, humorous... extremely poignant' Charlie Mortimer, Dear LupinDear Michael,Moving your whatnots et al into the flat has put paid to any improvements in my back. Still, at least it's done now.Your mother is already worrying how you'll cope and is at work on reams of notes on all sorts of matters from how to tell if meat has gone off to wash...

Behind the normal door of a normal house, in a normal street, two men are slowly driving each other insane. One of them is a psychopath. The father: Mr Todd is at his wits end. He's been robbed of his job as a tax inspector and is now stuck at home . . . with him. Frustrated. Lonely. Angry. Really angry. The son: Adrian has no job, no friends. He is at home all day, obsessively chopping vegetables and tap-tap-tapping on his computer. And he's getting worse, disappearing for hours at a time...

Simkin's poetry dares us to feel all there is, so that we can return to a state of wholeness. And just as the cure may lie in the poison, Simkin describes the machinations of the thinking mind to point us towards the quiet of the witnessing presence.Waves on Waves is an eclectic and delightfully engaging collection of 69 poems, divided into five sections according to the different types of brainwaves.Part lyric and part narrative, this poetry is written with compassion and ...