WHAT BOOK?

...are you reading now?

I READ a lot of history books because I do a funny podcast called We Are History with the comedian Angela Barnes — so I have just finished Vive La Revolution by Mark Steel; his hilarious account of 1789 and all that. But I am currently gripped by Four Shots In The Night by Henry Hemming, which is out next month, and is a fascinating and often shocking account of MI5’s infiltration into the IRA during The Troubles in Northern Ireland.

On the fiction front, I have just read Mrs Palfrey At The Claremont by the wonderful Elizabeth Taylor, a funny and moving story by a great English novelist who deserves to be more widely celebrated.

...would you take to a desert island?

I MIGHT take something I know I’d enjoy re-reading, say Catch-22 by Joseph Heller or The Slaves Of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton. But I feel slightly ashamed that I have never read War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy, because so many clever people that I respect tell me it is a very rich and complex novel.

Being on a desert island might be my one chance to put right that omission in my literary education.

Plus, it’s such a big thick book, I could use it to stand on and get to that last coconut which was just out of reach.

...first gave you the reading bug?

I WAS always drawn to humour as a child — I loved the Nigel Molesworth stories (Down With Skool! and How To Be Topp) and Asterix books. At the time I felt a little guilty and embarrassed that I wasn’t reading ‘proper books’, but of course, it is all valid and, as a parent, I was always happy to see my kids reading pretty much anything. I had no idea that one day I would write comedy scripts, but in my early teens I was already reading and re-reading the collected scripts from Hancock’s Half Hour, Fawlty Towers and all my favourite television programmes.

. . . left you cold?

MY WIFE gave me A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. I read all 736 pages of it with increasing despair and, at the end, while I could see the scale of the literary achievement, I just wished I had read something less unremittingly grim.

It was such a long catalogue of abuse and suffering and misery, and as someone who writes, hopefully, funny books with upbeat endings, I realised that this acclaimed novel probably wasn’t aimed at me.

I do feel like there is a tendency for the publishing industry and critics to think a book is more worthy and valid if it is really dark and full of suffering, but I would assert that it is also very hard to write properly funny and pacey books that make you feel good about the world.

(That’s me asking for the Nobel Prize For Literature for my stupid jokes about middle-class life!)

■ FAMILY Politics by John O’Farrell (Doubleday, €28) is out on March 14.