You get a feeling after reading 'Acid Drops' that however good it is, a collection of Williams' home-grown insults and put-downs would've been even more rewarding. It seems lazy and a tad wasteful that Williams' own acid bile and verbal whiplash isn't better chronicled for modern audiences than a few blurry You Tube clips. However, that's a minor gripe from some-one who unashamedly can't cram enough Williams into his day. I've loved him since childhood - only later in life to uncover his brilliantly nasty personality; high level intellectualism mixed with lavatory level vulgarity. Both extreme symptoms of his solitary nature and consequently his depressing societal failures. A one-off, insecure loner with the most complex (in both senses of the word) and misunderstood sexuality in human history - to know him and his work is to be completely enchanted.... 'Acid Drops' is an accumulation of cruel come-backs and wounding witticisms from such as Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, Groucho Marx, T S Eliott, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill - you get the idea. Hundreds of anecdotes and vignettes, lovingly divided into chapters (nb: KW was one of the great compartmentalists) by Williams who then delivers his own deliciously forthright opinions on the likes of Malice, Pique, Obloquy and Ridicule in the context of stabbing tiresome people with them. Kenneth Williams 'Complete Acid Drops' is a truly fine read; if I was luridly inclined I'd offer it as a perfect 'toilet book' (a useful analogy when you consider the ghastly cover; Williams smugly looking as though he's just dropped something!), bearing in mind the brackish scatological obsessions for which he was (partly) renowned.
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