Laurel and Hardy can still reduce audiences to helpless laughter, as Simon Louvish attests in this chronicle of their lives and works.

Stan and Ollie: The Roots Of Comedy

Biographies & Memoirs

Simon Louvish

Arts & Literature

Faber&Faber

Mae West: It Ain't No Sin

Faber Faber Ltd

Mae West: it Ain't No Sin

Humor & Entertainment

Faber and Faber

An Everyman who expressed the defiant spirit of freedom, Charlie Chaplin was first lauded and later reviled in the America that made him Hollywood's richest man. He was a figure of multiple paradoxes, and many studies have sought to unveil 'the man behind the mask.' Louvish charts the tale of the Tramp himself through his films - from the early Mack Sennett shorts through the major features (The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator et al.) He weighs the relationship between the Tramp, his creator, and his world-wide fans, and in doing so retrieves Chaplin as the iconic London street-kid who carried the 'surreal' antics of early BritishMusic Hall triumphantly onto the Hollywood screen. Louvish also looks anew at Chaplin's and the Tramp's social and political ideas - the challenge to fascism, defiance of the McCarthyite witch-hunts, eventual 'exile', and last mature disguises as the serial-killer Monsieur Verdoux and the dying English clown Calvero in Limelight.  This book is an epic journey, summing up the roots of Comedy and its appeal to audiences everywhere, who revelled in the clown's raw energy, his ceaseless struggle against adversity, and his capacity to represent our own fears, foibles, dreams, inner demons and hopes.

Chaplin

What's Up God?: A Romance of the Apocalypse

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Weidenfeld &Nicholson

In a sanatorium in East Lothian, failed novelist Danny Hohenlohe contemplates murderous revenge against London publisher, McTeague. Also in residence is Avram Blok, the ex-lunatic, emigre-Israeli hero of three previous Louvish novels. He's begun a new life as a lay therapist.

The days of miracles and wonders

Canongate

The Cosmic Follies

Institute of Contemporary Arts

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Books by Simon Louvish