'We don't reaaly grow up,' says Robert Thomas Allen. 'We get bigger, fatter, more tired and involved in making a living, but the vital part of us is timeless.' So is Allen's humour, in this delightful collection of essays about children's birthdays, television commercials, parenthood, shopping with women, office parties, horoscopes, and hypochondriac hens. Allen knows well the situations he describes so wittily in Children, Wives and Other Wildlife. After years of working at home surrounding by his wife and her female friends, he considers himself an authority on women. As a father he has studied child psychology the hard way. And, having lived the idyllic life of a writer who moves to the country, he has learned to 'never, never trust a bull'. The result of his experience is a nostalgic, wryly philosophical book for the ordinary man.
