Reach for the Ground

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The end of the road - Rated
This is the least engaging of the 3 collections of Bernard's columns. At this stage he had sunk into melancholy, bitterness and depression, and seemed to no longer enjoy anything. There is still meat and potatoes for the confirmed Bernard fan, and moments of the old self-deprecating humour still peep through, but beginners should start with the other 2 volumes to see what all the fuss is about.

Cranky, but never boring - Rated
Like his previous book, Low Life, this is mainly a collection of Jeffrey Bernard's weekly columns from The Spectator, originally published between January 1990 and December 1994. This book was published in 1996, a year before Bernard died. And, since his columns were a sort of diary, you can see his death coming week by week. He writes quite a bit about being in hospital ("there aren't many hospitals left in London that I haven't been to now"). He is in bad shape. After years of smoking and drinking, he is no longer handsome (his photo is used in the newspapers to warn young people off smoking.) and, because of his diabetes, he need to have a leg amputated.

While his health declines, Bernard's fame rises. During this period, the play based on his columns ("Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell" by Keith Waterhouse) becomes a hit and biographies of his life are published. Despite this, the book is mostly about his drinking and lounging in the Coach and Horses pub and the days when he was a racing columnist and of his four former wives. He rails about life's annoyances sometimes, especially against anti-smokers and anti-drinkers. Though sometime cranky and often melancholy, he never fails to be interesting.

Besides his columns, the book includes three longer pieces about Bernard's growing up and London's Soho, where he drank with the painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud; the poets, Louis McNeice and Dylan Thomas; and others. He writes about his breakdown from alcoholism and the resulting period of hospitalization. These pieces, a sort of "how I got to this point in my life" introduction to the columns, are a moving description of the "fog and loneliness of a boozer's day."

The book has eight pages of photographs and a foreword by Peter O'Toole, who starred in "Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell."