The Complete Michael Palin Diaries
On sale
5th November 2015
Price: £38.97
All three of Michael Palin’s bestselling diaries, covering 30 years from 1969 to 1998.
Throughout his years in Monty Python, his many successful film appearances, the writing of his novels and his travels to all corners of the globe, there was one constant in Michael Palin’s life: the daily ritual of writing in his diary.
Now, for the first time, the complete diaries have been brought together, charting Michael’s highs and lows, and studded with his hallmarks of curiosity and sense of adventure. Volume one begins when he was newly married and struggling to make a name for himself in the world of television comedy. But Monty Python was just around the corner. Volume two follows his trail through seven movies and ends with his final preparations for the documentary that was to change his life – Around the World in Eighty Days. And volume three tracks his journeys to far-flung places, not to mention more films, award-winning TV roles and a first novel.
‘Palin shows himself in these diaries to be an acute observer as well as a champion curator of an anecdote’ Sunday Times
Throughout his years in Monty Python, his many successful film appearances, the writing of his novels and his travels to all corners of the globe, there was one constant in Michael Palin’s life: the daily ritual of writing in his diary.
Now, for the first time, the complete diaries have been brought together, charting Michael’s highs and lows, and studded with his hallmarks of curiosity and sense of adventure. Volume one begins when he was newly married and struggling to make a name for himself in the world of television comedy. But Monty Python was just around the corner. Volume two follows his trail through seven movies and ends with his final preparations for the documentary that was to change his life – Around the World in Eighty Days. And volume three tracks his journeys to far-flung places, not to mention more films, award-winning TV roles and a first novel.
‘Palin shows himself in these diaries to be an acute observer as well as a champion curator of an anecdote’ Sunday Times
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Reviews
Palin's 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
Delightful and often extraordinarily funny . . . An entertaining and at times deeply moving read
If anyone writes a diary purely for the joy of it, it is Michael Palin . . . This combination of niceness, with his natural volubility, creates Palin's expansiveness
Palin reminds me of Samuel Johnson: driven, intellectually formidable, and spurred on by self-reproach and the wholly irrational idea that he's 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
His entries are riddled with the astute wit and generosity of spirit that characterise both his performances and his previously published writing
It's 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 People's Palin
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
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
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 that's quite a triumph of tone