A MODEST PROPOSAL AND OTHER WRITINGS
by Jonathan Swift
Penguin, £10.99
His reaction to famine in Ireland shows you can take a dark idea and get across a forceful moral argument. He advocates the cooking of babies: wonderful satire.
I, CLAUDIUS
by Robert Graves
Penguin, £9.99
It has wonderful dialogue and is a great study in how corruption seeps into everyone. You could transpose it to Trump’s America or Putin’s Russia.
ADOLF HITLER: MY PART IN HIS DOWNFALL
by Spike Milligan
Penguin, £8.99
A comic memoir about his time in the war. Because he’s got the confi dence to be funny, it makes the touching stuff more touching and powerful stuff more powerful.
GENIUS: THE LIFE AND SCIENCE OF RICHARD FEYNMAN
by James Gleick
Out of print
An extraordinary polymath who won the Nobel Prize for his work in particle physics. He inspired a character I did in a radio show. I didn’t pay attention to science at school but this got me interested.
ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE
by William Goldman
Out of print
A fantastic memoir for anyone in my line of work. It begins with the famous line: “Nobody knows anything.” It shows how absurd and random the world of commercial fi lm is.
EMPIRE OF THE SUN
by JG Ballard
Fourth Estate, £8.99
A brilliant account of what it’s like to be a PoW. The boy in this is trapped in a situation where all moral codes have disappeared. My dad was a PoW and he must have had a long period where he had no idea if he had a future.