From the bestselling author of A Shed of One's Own, a very funny memoir about being 60.Marcus Berkmann's funny, instantly recognisable description of middle-age in A Shed of One's Own struck a chord and turned it into a bestseller. Now he realises he has entered a new age category: the Young-Old.Well, the body continues to provide challenges (every group meeting seems to begin the dreaded 'organ recital'), and the bank balance may not be d...

Marcus Berkmann has been a freelance writer since 1988, working for newspapers and magazines and occasionally writing a book, like this one. He reckons to have written literally millions of words in that time, several of them in the right order. This, his 13th or possibly 14th book, is about those years of writing: the triumphs (few), the heartbreaks (many), the sackings (more than you would expect), the biscuits (many, many more than you would expect). In it he somehow makes the act of st...

Marcus Berkmann was for many years the pop critic of the Spectator, waiting like most freelances to get fired. He's also the author of the bestselling Berkmann's Cricket Miscellany, concentrating on the ridiculous true stories and the weird characters of that most eccentric of sports. Here he combines the two, in a wildly entertaining ride through the galloping absurdities of pop, from Elvis Presley's real hair colour, through Janet Jackson's more intimate piercings, to C...

Marcus Berkmann is a competitive obsessive but where he was very bad at cricket (see RAIN MEN) he's a brilliantly knowledgeable nerd and a great success at pub quizzes. He's possibly the only man in Britain whom Nick Hornby is jealous of - because his team beat Hornby's in a pub quiz and went on to win the EVENING STANDARD knockout tournament.This hilarious book will do for quiz culture - from Mastermind to Fifteen to One to the quiz in your local - what LOST IN MUSIC did for bad r...

Forty-seven years after NBC killed it off, Star Trek celebrates its half-century in a state of rude health. Boldly going where several other people have been before, Marcus Berkmann tells the story of this sturdy science fiction vehicle from its first five-year mission (rudely curtailed to three), through the dark years of the 1970s, the triumphant film series and The Next Generation, to the current 'reboot' films, with a younger cast taking on the characters of Kirk, Spo...

The best cricket novel ever written . . .Before 'Sandpapergate' there was The Amazing Test Match Crime.'Cricket is the great narrative sport, and a close, hard-fought Test Match is the nearest any sport comes to the structure, rhythm and feel of a good novel. The opening is there, if someone is brave enough to take it . . .' Marcus BerkmannEngland are due to play Australia Imperia (names have been changed for legal reasons) at the Oval, in the final Test of...

Approaching its 200th birthday in the rudest of health, the Spectator is known for the quality of its writing and the deep eccentricity of some of its writers. Given the freedom to say what they want, they take that freedom and more, and the result is original, provocative, often very funny, sometimes plain wrong.From Jeffrey Bernard's reports from the Soho frontline and Auberon Waugh fulminating about hamburger gases in the early 1990s, we encounter in turn the wild strea...

There are many cricket books, and they are all the same. 'Don't Tell Goochie', autobiographical insights of nights on the tiles in Delhi with Lambie and the boys; 'Fruit cake days', a celebrated humourist recalls 'ball' - related banter of yore; and Wisden, a deadly weapon when combined with a thermos flask. Rain Men is different. Like the moment the genius of Richie Benaud first revealed itself to you, it is a cricketing epiphany, a landmark in the literature of the game.Shining t...

Marcus Berkmann, author of the cricket classics Rain Men and Zimmer Men, returns to the great game with this irresistible miscellany of cricketing trivia, stories and more fascinating facts than Geoffrey Boycott could shake a stick of rhubarb at. Which England captain smoked two million cigarettes in his lifetime? Which Australian captain, asked what his favourite animal was, said 'Merv Hughes'? What did Hitler think of cricket? Which National Hunt trainer had a dog calle...

For many men, middle age arrives too fast and without due warning. One day you are young, free and single; the next you are bald, fat and washed-up, with weird tendrils of hair growing out of your ears. None of it seems fair. With age should come dignity and respect, but instead everyone makes tired jokes about buying a motorbike.Marcus Berkmann isn't having it. Having marked his fiftieth birthday by hiding under the duvet for six weeks, the author of the cricket classics Rain Men ...

There are lots of books about parenthood. But if you look closely most of them are about motherhood. Fathers get brief paragraphs about needing the odd cuddle themselves and being helpful for carrying the heavier elements of baby kit, but that's it.Fatherhood - The Truth, on the other hand, is a shed-friendly man's guide to the whole scary, life-changing business. One that looks beyond the happy-clappy cliches into the fiery hell of night feeds and projectile vomiting. 'Sh...

In summer 2009, by far the most popular event in the cricketing calendar comes round again - the Ashes series between England and Australia. The anticipation will be intense, the hype absurd, the sense of expectation never remotely likely to be satisfied, for two good reasons. England won in 2005 by a whisker. We can't expect anything so good again, possibly for the rest of our lives. The second reason is even more brutally realistic. For the truth is that, over the past twenty years at le...