|summary=I spent many of my teenage years reading James Herriot's books, and I found that this collection of anecdotes and poems by Gervase Phinn had a real flavour of Herriot about it. Perhaps it was just the setting, for Phinn was a school inspector in the Dales for many years, but I think he also has that knack of capturing a situation, and a character, and bringing out the humour without making the person appear ridiculous. Here he collates stories from his other books, some Christmassy and others not, and he relates them with several of his own poems interspersed between.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141036435</amazonuk>
}}
[[Category:History]]
{{newreview
|author=Simon Garfield
|title=Just My Type: A Book About Fonts
|rating=4.5
|genre=Humour
|summary=A quality typeface is a bit like a good referee at a football match in that you only really notice them if something has gone wrong. A referee is there to facilitate the players on the pitch, not to be the star of the show (though watching Match of the Day these past few weeks you'd often beg to differ). So it is with typefaces. A good type helps the reader, enhances the flow and makes the viewing experience easy and simple. Well sort of.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846683017</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Bob Servant and Neil Forsyth
|title=Bob Servant: Hero of Dundee
|rating=3.5
|genre=Humour
|summary=After [[Delete This at Your Peril: One Man's Fearless Exchanges with the Internet Spammers by Bob Servant|bursting into public consciousness]] as the scourge of email spammers, Broughty Ferry's resident polymath Bob Servant has returned. This time, he expands upon the colourful life only hinted at in his previous oeuvre, Delete this at Your Peril. And what a life it has been. He steers us from his humble beginnings, his broken family and traumatic schooldays, through the rise and fall of his window cleaning empire, and his role in Dundee's brutal cheeseburger wars. Along the way, we witness his struggles with, respectively, women ('skirt'), his simpleton sidekick Frank, and the demon drink.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841589209</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=P K Munroe
|title=You Can Stick It
|rating=3.5
|genre=Humour
|summary=Literary merit? Absolutely none!
Plot, characterisation and all that other stuff you usually talk about? Nope – there's none of that, either.
Ah, so it's non-fiction? Well, calling it ''fact'' would be stretching things a little too far...
So, come on then. What ''is'' it?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007362188</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Axel Scheffler
|title=How to Keep a Pet Squirrel
|rating=4
|genre=Humour
|summary=So, how do you keep a pet squirrel? Well, the simple answer is that you don't. They're wild animals and not at all suitable for keeping in captivity, but accepted thinking didn't always run that way. It was whilst he was dipping into ''The Children's Encyclopaedia'' of 1910 that Axel Scheffler came across a small but indispensible guide to obtaining and caring for your pet squirrel. His inventive mind came up with these beautiful illustrations to accompany the text and if you're looking for an amusing gift for an animal-loving adult then this book could well be the answer.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571255981</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=PJ Vanston
|title=Crump
|rating=3
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=It's Kevin Crump's first day as a lecturer at Thames Metropolitan University - an ex-polytechnic. It's the happiest day of his life, and he can't wait to see all that it holds, and make a difference to all his students. And then it hits him: the relentless pettiness of authority figures, the students who can't string two sentences together, the lowering of standards in search of higher test scores, so more money from foreign students, and political correctness gone (as I believe the saying goes) mad.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848762852</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Lennon
|title=In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works
|rating=3
|genre=Humour
|summary=During the height of Beatlemania, John Lennon used to doodle or write short poems or nonsense stories to pass the time (and there must have been a good deal of time to pass away on tour, if only waiting for screaming fans to leave them alone and go back home). Some of them were seen by Tom Maschler, literary editor at Jonathan Cape, who encouraged him to produce more. The results were published in two very successful short books in 1964 and 1965.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099530422</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Lindsay
|title=Emails From An Asshole
|rating=4
|genre=Humour
|summary=Some classified ads are crying out for trolling. John Lindsay replies to them, spins them a yarn, and strings them along for as long as possible. Sometimes the advert is fairly innocuous and he emails them anyway. These are emails from an asshole, after all.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1402778279</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=L C Tyler
|title=The Herring In The Library
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Tall, elegant Ethelred is a gentleman, and a third-rate author. Elsie, his literary agent, is short and dumpy, and not afraid to speak her mind. It is Elsie, in fact, who constantly assures her client he only occasionally aspires to the giddy heights of being second-rate. This could be the business partnership from hell, but not only do these two seem to get along, they even manage to solve crimes together. In this, the third outing for L C Tyler's eccentric sleuths, we are provided with a locked room mystery, a cast of possible villains of the most stereotypical type, and a fresh, funny tale which will make you laugh so much you'll get a stitch.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0230714684</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=A J Jacobs
|title=My Experimental Life
|rating=3.5
|genre=Humour
|summary=A J Jacobs has a reputation for setting himself onerous tasks. His first book was about reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica; his second detailed a year spent according to the Biblical precepts. In My Experimental Life, he recounts nine briefer episodes of living outside his comfort zone.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099547422</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Seth Grahame-Smith
|title=Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter
|rating=3.5
|genre=Humour
|summary='Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.' That quote, on the Statue of Liberty, was probably not designed with the inclusion of vampires in mind. But by some means or another North America is rife with the things – hiding in plain sight, as the older ones can bear sunlight, with the help of darkened glasses. It might just come down to one eager young man to rid his new country of such things, on his way to something he’s a bit more known for.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849014086</amazonuk>
}}
