Halfway To Hollywood, Michael Palin
Halfway To Hollywood, Michael Palin
List: $31.99 | Sale: $22.40
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Halfway To Hollywood
Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two)

Author: Michael Palin

Narrator: Michael Palin

Unabridged: 28 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/11/2022

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included

Synopsis

Michael Palin's bestselling diaries of the 1980s.

After a live performance at the Hollywood Bowl, The Pythons made their last performance together in 1983 in the hugely successful MONTY PYTHON'S MEANING OF LIFE. Writing and acting in films and television then took over much of Michael's life, culminating in the smash hit A FISH CALLED WANDA (for which he won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor), and the first of his seven celebrated television journeys for the BBC. He co-produced, wrote and played the lead in THE MISSIONARY opposite Maggie Smith, who also appeared with him in A PRIVATE FUNCTION, written by Alan Bennett.

Such was his fame in the US, he was enticed into once again hosting the enormously popular show Saturday Night Live, in one edition of which his mother makes a highly successful surprise guest appearance. He filmed several journeys for television and became chairman of the pressure group, Transport 2000. His family remains a constant as his and Helen's children enter their teens.

About Michael Palin

Michael Palin has written and starred in numerous TV programmes and films, from Monty Python and Ripping Yarns to The Missionary and The Death of Stalin. He has also made several much-acclaimed travel documentaries, his journeys taking him to the North and South Poles, the Sahara Desert, the Himalayas, Eastern Europe and Brazil. His books include accounts of his journeys, two novels (Hemingway's Chair and The Truth), three volumes of diaries, Erebus, the Story of a Ship and Great Uncle Harry. From 2009 to 2012 he was president of the Royal Geographical Society. He received a BAFTA fellowship in 2013, and a knighthood in the 2019 New Year Honours list. He lives in London.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Edmole on August 03, 2011

I would happily spend one hour every day in a papoose affixed to Michael Palin's front listening to him speak. I haven't put this plan to him yet.......more

Goodreads review by F.R. on May 15, 2016

January the first 1980 until the very moment Michael Palin sets off around the world in eighty days. Palin does remain amiable company as a diarist, but I didn’t love this volume as much as I did the first. Whereas Volume One had the rush and excitement of the prime years of Python to see it through,......more

Goodreads review by Jack on July 09, 2013

I enjoyed this one even more than the first volume! Sure, we all got drawn in to read behind-the-scenes stories of Python, but these books give so much more. Social commentary, rubbing elbows with famous people, the frustrations and elation of trying to create while trying to be a responsible family......more

Goodreads review by Rob on January 09, 2012

There's probably an argument that this second volume of Palin's diaries is the dull one, charting the period between Palin's most memorable career highlights: Monty Python and his travel documentaries. Yet this supposedly fallow period (one where even Palin retrospectively notes that he didn't seem......more

Goodreads review by David on July 05, 2018

I read the first volume of Palin's diaries 7 years ago, having received them as a birthday present. This second set of diaries was equally fascinating - what an articulate, creative, reflective and humourous man he is!......more

Quotes

Palin reminds me of Samuel Johnson: driven, intellectually formidable, and spurred on by self-reproach and the wholly irrational idea that he's not really getting on with it . . . Palin is a seriously good writer. These diaries are full of fine phrases and sharp little sketches of scenes DAILY MAIL

This is a brisk, pithy, amusing read, teeming with the writer's inner life, crammed with high-quality observations . . . and deft ink-pen sketches of his associates SPECTATOR

Charming and vastly entertaining IRISH TIMES

His entries are riddled with the astute wit and generosity of spirit that characterise both his performances and his previously published writing TIME OUT, 'Book of the Week'

It's clear why Cleese later nominated Palin as his luxury item on Desert Island Discs . . . he makes such unfailingly good company . . . this is the agreeably written story of how a former Python laid the foundation stone by which he would reinvent himself as a public institution: the People's Palin GUARDIAN

A fascinating and wry cultural take on the 1980s . . . it's also, when added to volume one, proving to be the most beguiling and revealing of ongoing autobiographies SUNDAY HERALD

This is the Michael Palin with whom the public has fallen in love. A man whose ordinary likeability makes us feel we know him, and that he is incapable of nastiness or an outburst of bad temper SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

There are some fabulous and very funny snippets about Alan Bennett and Maggie Smith . . . the behind-the-scenes antics of the Pythons and their wider circle make great reading OBSERVER

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