Michael Palin - Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988--1998

The best sort of convivial read, like having a gossip with an old friend over a few drinks Travelling to Work is a delight. It is a book you find yourself devouring in a great greedy session

Sunday Times

The life it records is so phenomenally varied How he finds time to update his diary is a mystery. Update it he does though and he does so with fluency, wit, glowing affability and lightning flashes of anger Weaving between observation and introspection, he comes up with a pithy phrase to describe everything from a Suffolk sunset to the end of apartheid but he sparkles most brightly when evoking the speech and the personality of his associates

Sunday Express

These diaries record an astonishingly successful career Yet he never becomes objectionable; he always keeps that saving touch of everyman, if not quite Mr Pooter, a nobody These diaries are remarkably good company, always dependable, never upsetting: safely enjoyable, page after page. And thats quite a triumph of tone

Evening Standard

At first you think how lucky Palin is to be living his life. Then, gradually, you see the dark side. He connects with you in a lovely way, which is very calming

Spectator, Books of the Year

Filled with amusing and revealing anecdotes

Observer Food Monthly

Praise for Volume II of the diaries: Halfway to Hollywood

Palin reminds me of Samuel Johnson: driven, intellectually formidable, and spurred on by self-reproach and the wholly irrational idea that hes not really getting on with it Palin is a seriously good writer. These diaries are full of fine phrases and sharp little sketches of scenes

Daily Mail

This is a brisk, pithy, amusing read, teeming with the writers inner life, crammed with high-quality observations and deft ink-pen sketches of his associates

Spectator

Charming and vastly entertaining

Irish Times

His entries are riddled with the astute wit and generosity of spirit that characterise both his performances and his previously published writing

Time Out, Book of the Week

Its clear why Cleese later nominated Palin as his luxury item on Desert Island Discs he makes such unfailingly good company this is the agreeably written story of how a former Python laid the foundation stone by which he would reinvent himself as a public institution: the Peoples Palin

Guardian

A fascinating and wry cultural take on the 1980s its also, when added to volume one, proving to be the most beguiling and revealing of ongoing autobiographies

Sunday Herald

This is the Michael Palin with whom the public has fallen in love. A man whose ordinary likeability makes us feel we know him, and that he is incapable of nastiness or an outburst of bad temper

Sunday Telegraph

There are some fabulous and very funny snippets about Alan Bennett and Maggie Smith the behind-the-scenes antics of the Pythons and their wider circle make great reading

Observer

Praise for Volume I of the diaries: The Python Years

His showbiz observations are so absorbing Palin is an elegant and engaging writer

Guardian

Accomplished If Palins comic genius is a given, this is a more rounded portrait of the decade which saw the Pythons become icons. Our favourite TV explorer shows us the workings of an unstoppable machine

Daily Express

Palins style is so fluid, and his sincerity so palpable, that it is often easy to underestimate just how talented he is as a comedian, broadcaster and a writer [the diaries] are just too good and he is too modest

Sunday Express

Delightful and often extraordinarily funny An entertaining and at times deeply moving read

Mail on Sunday

If anyone writes a diary purely for the joy of it, it is Michael Palin This combination of niceness, with his natural volubility, creates Palins expansiveness

The Times

Palins steady eye, contemplative bent and instinct for honest appraisal make him the perfect chronicler of a frequently insane period which saw the Monty Python team become the most celebrated comedians in the world

Time Out

A real delight to read

Saga Magazine

A slow burn, revealing its pleasures only gradually, and allowing readers the warm glow of hindsight denied its writer This book will make the perfect present for those comedy obsessives of a certain age, who will know exactly what it is long before they have unwrapped it

Spectator