The Ascent Of Rum Doodle

A hilarious spoof and perfect parody of Britishness...it shames what now claims to be comedy

The Times

A veritable feast... incredibly enjoyable... a marvellous romp

Geographical Magazine

An amazing book about mountain climbing from 1956. Laugh-out-loud literature

Tim Key, Guardian

I just love this book. Everything about it is nearly perfect... hugely enjoyable and brilliantly sustained.

From the introduction by Bill Bryson

This gentle, deadly parody of the tight-arsed old school of British exploration narratives is seemingly a cult book among mountaineers, but it has been virtually unknown to the reading public since its first publication in 1956

Guardian

This wonderfully funny parody of adventure stories was first written in the 1950s but is just as fresh today with a truly brilliant comic narrator whose commentary on the expedition members is unintentionally hilarious. Buy it

Sunday Mirror

Wonderful. Rum Doodle does for mountaineering what Three Men in a Boat did for Thames-going or Catch-22 did for the Second World War. It is simply an account of the leader of an expedition up Rum Doodle, a 40,000 and a half foot peak in the Himalayas, in the same way that Scoop is simply a tale about newsgathering in Africa. The tone is nearer to Pooter than anyone else I can think of, but the flavour is all W.E. Bowman's own

Sunday Times