THE DREAMER

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

CLIFF RICHARD

Ebury, 416pp, £20

‘For some time now, the exclamation mark has been going out of fashion,’ noted Craig Brown in the Mail on

Sunday. ‘So it’s good to see Cliff Richard refusing to stint...you can measure out his life in exclamation marks. There are at least two or three on every page.’

Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times said the book ‘aims for a breezy account of the 80-year-old’s life, yet many of these pages feel gritted and clenched, the testimony of someone who... can’t quite shake a deep suspicion that he’s been hard done by’. ‘Cliff can be surprisingly prickly,’ agreed Brown. For example, ‘at every mention of the Beatles, he grows somewhat snarky, particularly at their success in America’. The televised 2014 police raid on Cliff’s home looms large in the book. ‘He was never arrested and investigations were dropped,’ said Segal. ‘Yet it is an interlude that clouds The Dreamer, real-world menace impinging on a carefully curated life… It’s a book studded with passive-aggressive “just kidding” exclamation marks... At times you almost check for Steve Coogan in the ghostwriting wings.’

But the Telegraph’s Neil Mccormick thought it was ‘easy to make fun of Sir Cliff. [He] remains too rooted in a pre-rock mindset of family-friendly light entertainment to ever develop the artistic gravitas he seems to crave. He can come across as prickly and oversensitive – but, who wouldn’t, when subjected to so much sneery condescension?’