Product Description

They...go. They vanish. People. Civilizations. Languages. Philosophies. Works of art disappear, species are extinguished, books are lost. Dunwich is drowned, Pompeii buried, Athena's statue gone from the Parthenon, Suetonius's Lives of the Great Whores gone the way of the Roman Empire. Whole libraries of knowledge, galleries of secrets. Gone. Little things, too. Train compartments. Snuff, galoshes, smog. Your mother's perfume. Our culture, our knowledge and all our lives are shadows cast by what went before. We are defined, not by what we have, but by what we have lost along the way. And so, Lost Worlds: a glossary of the missing, a cabinet of absent curiosities, it weaves a web of everything we no longer have. Lost Worlds: the book that falls open at every page.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #122478 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 296 pages

James Delingpole, Literary Review
'I can confidently predict that Michael Bywater’s Lost Worlds is going to be an enormous popular success.'

Val Hennessy, Critic’s Choice, Daily Mail
‘Wonderfully original, entertaining and occasionally tear-jerking miscellany about life, loss and the human condition'

Cambridge (Cambridge Society magazine)
'A book to dip into. It is a wonderfully eclectic selection of vanished ideas, objects, habits, words and assumptions'

Customer Reviews

A Tardis of a book
Pick this up in a Christmas-stacked bookshop and you might think you were browsing (yet) another of those Schott-like lists, albeit an aparently denser one.
But do not be deceived by the alphabetical arrangement or the deliciously eccentric index; Bywater's book is not just, or even, a lexicon of loss. It is in reality an autobiography, a celebration of the life of Great Britain in the second half of the C20, its certainties, its conventions, its style and aspirations and of a child growing into a man as some of those solidities proved themselves ephemeral. Darkly elegaic at times, luminous and lyrical at others, angry, affectionate, erudite, self-indulgent and, above all, terribly terribly funny.

(Perhaps garters and Virol will come in the second edition?)

A wonderful, life-affirming book
I came to this having greatly liked Michael Bywater's work in The Independent and I wasn’t disappointed: it’s a marvellous book that contains nostalgia but which is informed by a very sharp sense of humour. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read ‘Ancients, Wisdom of the,’ and each time it makes me laugh again. Wonderful!

Incidentally, theodorawayte is wrong that the Bakelite telephone with its little drawer is missing: it’s right there, in footnote 67, page49, under Bakelite.

Rare,Unusual and very very funny
This books sums up the author so totally, with its cocktail of cynicism,nostalgia, hope, angst,resentment, dissatisfaction and almost sentimental yearnings for normality...security....homeliness. This book seems to be intensely personal yet accessible to everyone...we can all remember and indentify with things that he discusses...we get reminded of things from our youth that we had forgotten about and learn about new things that are a focal part of someone else's childhood.But the main thing about Lost Worlds..is that it is unbelievably funny, it had me actually having to lie down cause i got a stitch from laughing...some of the stories will be imprinted on yr brain forever...Its a wonderful, unusual and brilliant book and i thoroughly recommend it.