Stalin ate my homework

Alexei knew he was doomed to be different the day he was taken to see Sergei Eisentein's Alexander Nevsky instead of Walt Disney's Bambi.

Born on the day that egg rationing came to an end, Alexei grew up with his parents and the Soviet Weekly.

Each year they holidayed in Eastern Europe, where they were shown round locomotive factories and the sites of Nazi atrocities.

Very funny and (almost) stranger than Alexei's fiction, this is a memoir about how Liverpool, Communism and a mother that his teachers were frightened of, made him want to leave home and make people laugh.