Product Description

School is 'wet and weedy', according to Nigel Molesworth, the 'goriller of 3B', 'curse of St Custard's' and superb chronicler of fifties English life. Nothing escapes his disaffected eye and he has little time for such things as botany walks and cissy poetry with an assortment of swots, snekes and oiks. Instead he is very good at missing lessons, charming masters and putting down little brothers, in fact he is exceptional at most things except spelling. Wildly funny and full of sharp observations on life, the ‘Molesworth tetralogy’ is magnificently complemented by the illustrations of Ronald Searle

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10911 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Customer Reviews

Advanced, forthright, signifficant
More gothic than Mervyn Peake, more cynical than George Orwell, more English than Ian Fleming and much, much funnier than Noel Coward.

The setting is an English boys' school in the early 1950s. Molesworth introduces us to his teachers, his family, his "grate friend" Peason, and his views on being a "young Elizabethan" in the "atommic age". Forget about "Lord Of The Flies". Molesworth and his cohorts are the most convincing schoolboys in fiction; by turns cynical, daydreaming, snobbish or barbaric but always possessed with a hysterical, surreal sense of humour. This is a book you will never regret buying - in fact, having read it, you will be pressing copies on your friends like a newly converted Hare Krisha.

Unreservedly Classic English Humour
Set in the 50's, Nigel Molesworth is a schoolboy at a minor public school in the wilds of the English countryside. You'd think it would be aimed at kids - but, as any fule kno, it's for the grownups. When I first bought this book in 1991 I ignored the girlfriend I was visiting for six hours straight while I read it cover to cover, occasionally exploding on the sofa in abject hysterics. I read it again on the train back to London. I've had to buy it again since then because I wore my original copy out - the spine collapsed and the pages fell out. Bluntly - this book it utterly fantastic, blindingly hilarious and it's less than a tenner. If they made Nigel Molesworth T-shirts I'd buy one of those too. And the desk diary, the calendar, the screensaver... Buy this book now. :o)

a *grate* read
this book is pretty much the world through the eyes of a cynic. The fact that the cynic happens to be a schoolboy, thoroughly fed up with Pythagoras (a bore), masters (weeds), and his fellow sufferers at school (variously clots, weedstruck wets, cads, oiks, and sneeks), enables us all to understand exactly what he is talking about. Even if you can not profess to ever having met sigismund the mad maths master.
The book, with all it's ravings on skool, Xmas, and skool sossages is hilarious and clever. The illustrations by Ronald Searle are excellent ( do the drawings compliment the writing or is it the other way round?), and I would recommend this to anyone whose sense of humour extends further than Friends. My favourite part, it must be said, is the spelling...