"Terry Jones was a Python, a historian, a bestselling children's author and a very naughty boy. He loved to play women in drag, started a magazine about countryside ecology (Vole), founded his own real-ale brewery and was even once a columnist for this newspaper, beginning one piece in 2011 like this: In the 14th century there were two pandemics. One was the Black Death, the other was the commercialisation of warfare."
"He even used to write jokes for Cliff Richard. It would be tempting in view of all this to call him a renaissance man, except that Jones rather despised the highfalutin Renaissance, preferring the earthiness of medieval times: his first published book was a scholarly reinterpretation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, arguing that the hero's fighting and pillaging was being presented satirically by the poet as something deplorable."
"The spiritual heart of this biography, though, is the institution of the north London pub, in several of which Jones would happily chat about his latest projects to the author of this book, a friend and comedy historian. Many pints were quaffed, and it seems as though no showbiz minutiae emerging therefrom have been omitted in these pages. As an adoring account of the career of one of the men who ran away to join the Flying Circus, it could hardly be bettered,"
Terry Jones combined comedy, medieval scholarship, children's storytelling, brewing and countryside activism throughout a varied life. He loved dressing as women for performance, founded the ecology magazine Vole, launched a real-ale brewery and wrote jokes for Cliff Richard. His scholarly work included a reinterpretation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale portraying the hero's violence as satirical, and he mined Norse myth for The Saga of Erik the Viking, insisting on horned helmets for effect. He cherished north London pubs as conversational hubs, quaffed many pints with colleagues, and ultimately had his brain flash-frozen and donated to science.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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