MY SIX BEST BOOKS

ANDY HAMILTON, 63, co-wrote Drop The Dead Donkey and Outnumbered. He will talk about his novel The Star Witness (Unbound, £8.99) at Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 6.

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 confidence 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 film 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.