Stanley Baxter delighted over 20 million viewers at a time with his television specials. His pantos became legendary. His divas and dames were so good they were beyond description. Baxter was a most brilliant cowboy Coward, a smouldering Dietrich. He found immense laughs as Formby and Liberace. And his sex-starved Tarzan swung in a way Hollywood could never have imagined. But who is the real Stanley Baxter? The comedy actor's talents are matched only by his past reluctance to colour in the detail of his own character. Now, the man behind the mischievous grin, the twinkling eyes and the once-Brylcreemed coiffure is revealed. In a tale of triumphs and tragedies, of giant laughs and great falls from grace, we discover that while the enigmatic entertainer could play host to hundreds of different voices, the role he found most difficult to play was that of Stanley Baxter.

Why would Britain's most successful entertainer turn down the chance to capture America? What could pressure an actor with a five-picture deal to consider taking his own life? How could a brilliant comedy actor and impressionist make millions of people roar with laughter over four decades - in theatre, television and film - yet find personal happiness elusive? The real Stanley Baxter is now revealed...

Stanley Baxter looks back to the great days of Glasgow comedy. In a series of brilliantly funny sketches and anecdotes, he introduces a cast of typical Glasgow characters: the ladies of Bearsden, the Glasgow Italians, Gloria and Clara the waitresses, and Tattie Bacchante, amongst many others. He also explores Glasgow's unique class divisions; the glottal stops, the uvular 'r', the mysteries of Bachles, Nyaffs and Dreeps and those special Glasgow appurtenances of wigs, wallies and wellies. The result is a unique introduction to the people and language of this vibrant and colorful city.

“Magisterial and uplifting . . . A brilliant, grandscale sampling of sixty-five million years of human evolution . . . It shows the sweep and grandeur of life in its unrelenting course.” —The Denver Post Stretching from the distant past into the remote future, from primordial Earth to the stars, Evolution is a soaring symphony of struggle, extinction, and survival; a dazzling epic that combines a dozen scientific disciplines and a cast of unforgettable characters to convey the grand drama of evolution in all its awesome majesty and rigorous beauty. Sixty-five million years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, there lived a small mammal, a proto-primate of the species Purgatorius. From this humble beginning, Baxter traces the human lineage forward through time. The adventure that unfolds is a gripping odyssey governed by chance and competition, a perilous journey to an uncertain destination along a route beset by sudden and catastrophic upheavals. It is a route that ends, for most species, in stagnation or extinction. Why should humanity escape this fate? Praise for Evolution “Spectacular.”—The New York Times Book Review “Strong imagination, a capacity for awe, and the ability to think rigorously about vast and final things abound in the work of Stephen Baxter. . . . [Evolution] leaves the reader with a haunting portrayal of the distant future.”—Times Literary Supplement “A breath of fresh air . . . The miracle of Evolution is that it makes the triumph of life, which is its story, sound like the real story.”—The Washington Post Book World

In this extraordinary novel of mischief and menace, we see a young man's very self vanishing before his eyes—from the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and “one of our most gifted writers” (Chicago Tribune) "Entirely original.... So craftily construcyed that to appreciate how liberally Baxter plants creepy hints of what's to come a reader should really savor this book twice." —The Washington Post As a graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. There's Theresa, alluring but elusive, and Jamie, who is fickle if not wholly unavailable. But Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems also to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about.

Originally published: London: Doubleday, 2002.