A LIFE IN QUESTIONS

(Collins £8.99) HERE’S your starter for ten: who described himself like this in his recent memoir?

‘I am a strong swimmer, love fly-fishing, drink more than the Department of Health says is good for us, and have a dodgy knee . . .

‘Occasionally I sit on the loo and shoot squirrels out of the bathroom window.’

Come on, come on — I’ll have to hurry you. Well done! The bathroom squirrel- killer is that scourge of blustering politicians and ignorant students, Jeremy Paxman, who describes his autobiography with characteristic understatement as ‘just some stuff that happened’.

But he records his childhood — with an ‘uncomplaining mother’ and a ‘damaged’ ex-Naval father who thrashed him with sticks, shoes, cricket bats or the flat of his hand, and the highs and lows of his subsequent career — with a sharp eye, an acerbic wit and a lingering trace of melancholy.