Best books… John Cleese
The comedian, writer, actor and Monty Python founder John Cleese picks six of his favourite books. His memoir, So, Anyway…, has recently been released as an audiobook by Random House at £21.99
The Master and His
Emissary by Iain Mcgilchrist, 2009 (Yale £12.99). This is probably the most interesting and important book I’ve read. Mcgilchrist is an extraordinary man. After teaching at Oxford, he became a psychiatrist and worked on the neuroimaging of the brain. His book is about the brain’s distinct hemispheres, which he believes have different ways of being in life, and that in our modern world they’ve fallen out of balance.
Popper by Bryan Magee, 1973 (Fontana £9.99). To me, Karl Popper is the best philosopher of science of the last century. This little book taught me more about the philosophy of science than any other.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, 1869 (Vintage £9.99). It’s been many years since I read this, but I still remember certain sequences: men riding into battle, and the way they try to distract themselves from the fact that they could be dead in an hour’s time.
The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe, 1987 (Vintage £9.99). Wolfe’s big novel about 1980s New York is superb. It delighted me, and told me so much about a certain part of American society. Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky by Maurice Nicoll (six vols.), 1952 (Eureka £150).
Nicoll, a British psychiatrist, was a pupil of Armenian philosopher George Gurdjieff. His book contains brilliant advice on understanding one’s own psychology as viewed through the Esoteric Christian tradition.
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, 1954 (Penguin £8.99). I met Amis once and liked him very much. He was rather sour, but wrote beautifully and captured certain personalities spot on. Jim Dixon, a minor university lecturer, has wonderfully funny fantasies, and a sometime girlfriend called Margaret, who is one of the most awful human beings in fiction. I laughed so much reading this by a pool in Spain that I became a nuisance to the people around me.