Christmas gift ideas: Best books

Hudd is one of the last old-fashioned music hall turns. He has done everything from panto to seaside shows with radio, Hammer Horrors and ads for Quick Brew (“It’s not me, ma’am – it’s me little perforations!”) thrown in.

He has worked with a vast variety of fascinating people and has great stories about Max Miller, Ken Dodd and Lionel Bart – whose sequel to Oliver!, a musical about The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, remains ­unproduced because Bart sold the exclusive rights dozens of times over. O

n a chat show for Anglia TV, Hudd coped with a drunken Charles Hawtrey and at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, he encountered a Brian Blessed possibly in the throes of ­madness. Blessed’s practical jokes (jumping out of wardrobes or appearing on the sill outside an upstairs window) are ­hysterical to read about but probably as wearying to endure as his constant shouting.

Comedians on the whole are an insecure, suspicious breed – but Barry Cryer is an exception. As with Hudd’s book, Cryer’s Butterfly Brain (Orion, £14.99) is an amiable ramble around a seriously impressive career, begun when our author was a refugee from Leeds telling jokes between strippers at the Windmill in Soho. He progressed to being gagmeister for Danny La Rue at a nightclub and for David Frost on TV. Hired by Frankie Howerd, he found every oo-err, missus and sigh had to be scripted. Tommy Cooper made it up as he went along, as he “could create brilliance out of something simple”. There is a fascinating sequence about Humphrey Lyttelton, so “exceptionally private” that Barry worked with him for decades without knowing his phone number. He first visited his house after Humph’s funeral: the place had no windows.

William Shawcross’s thousand-page Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother: The Official Biography (Macmillan, £25) is an example of what goes wrong when an authorised life, vetted by the family and the keepers of the flame, is unable to show critical, independent thought. So nothing new on the Abdication, or Diana or the profligate finances at Clarence House.

It has been a remarkable year for diarists or biographies of diarists. Michael Bloch’s James Lees-Milne: The Life (John Murray, £25) is one of the best. Lees‑Milne was so posh he looked down on the Royal Family as middle class. In one of those criss-cross affairs beloved of the upper classes, Lees-Milne and wife Alvilde had flings with Harold Nicholson and his wife Vita Sackville-West: Lees-Milne with Harold and Alvilde with Vita. The bed-hopping was interspersed with Lees-Milne’s main task, to conserve stately homes for the nation, visiting crumbling piles and coaxing the owners to donate them to the National Trust. Lees-Milne’s life (1908-97) began in the Edwardian era and ended with Blair and Mandelson.

Another ancient creature was Frances Partridge, born in 1900 who died aged 103 just five years ago. She grew up knowing Henry James and Conan Doyle, moved in Bloomsbury circles and married Dora Carrington’s ex-husband Ralph. Frances Partridge: A Life by Anne Chisholm (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25) sensitively relates the suicides, the breakdowns, the egomania.

A venerable old bird happily still very much with us at 92 is Diana Athill. She was born in Kensington during a Zeppelin raid and spent her career as an editor for André Deutsch, ushering into print the novels of John Updike (whom she liked) and VS Naipaul (whom she found trying). She did not get going as an author until recently when Granta started publishing her memoirs.

Here they are in a bumper volume entitled Life Class (£25) a whopping treat, introduced by former Granta editor Ian Jack, who commends her “majestic” personality and “kindly schoolmistress” air. Jack says behind the poise lies a life of quiet, dignified suffering. Athill never recovered from being jilted by her fiancé at 22. The “shrivelling sensation” and distress of rejection were exacerbated when another lover, Didi, “killed himself, despite her enormous kindness to him, in his rent-free room in the flat where… she still lives”.

If there is nastiness in Gyles Brandreth’s nature it is well concealed. He has been getting surprisingly hostile reviews for Something Sensational To Read In The Train: The Diary Of A Lifetime (John Murray, £25) but to complain about Gyles being lightweight is like moaning that the ocean is wet. He is a jester, hopping around in his silly jumpers, bringing merriment to the world of Whitehall and Westminster. He is very good at what he does, being an enthusiast, and has managed to freeze himself in time as the irrepressible schoolboy who once won a Scrabble championship.

Very enjoyable is a running gag about Prince Philip, straight man to Gyles’s buffoon. When Gyles boasts about breakfasting with the actor who played Blake Carrington, the Prince says, “That’s nothing. I had breakfast with the Queen.”

A ndy Williams is a big name. Moon River And Me: The Autobiography (Orion, £20) is surprisingly engrossing – most celebrity memoirs are a total letdown, written as if by a committee to eradicate grit and normal human feelings. You are left looking at carefully chosen photographs, marvelling at the way, as they get older, the teeth of an American star get bigger and more bizarrely porcelain, until they shine and become a celestial light source.

Nightclub crooner Andy, however, is candid and humorous and far from bland. (He still has the teeth.) There are great anecdotes about the elderly Chico Marx, “who would give himself a facelift by pulling the folds of loose skin upward and outward and then hold them in place with strips of tape at his temples hidden under his wig”.

Andy went on a tour to entertain the troops with Zsa Zsa Gabor who everybody hated. He writes with passion about the evils of racial segregation. Andy’s friend Sammy Davis Jr would be hired to sing in Las Vegas, “yet, like Nat King Cole, Count Basie and others, he wasn’t even given a dressing room and had to wait outside between shows”.

Compared with that perhaps Sinatra’s nastiness wasn’t so bad – though I don’t know. Andy makes Frank’s grudges and vendettas sound pretty nasty. People would get beaten up on Ol’ Blue Eyes’ say-so. “It was always a mystery to me how someone like Sinatra, who could sing with such heart-melting tenderness and sensitivity, could also act with the most cold-hearted cruelty.”

By complete contrast there’s Ozzy Osbourne, a 21st-century medieval madman. Born in Birmingham in 1948, he escaped from his secondary modern and the prospect of night shifts on the assembly line to become one of the greatest comic characters since Inspector Clouseau.

He has bitten the heads off bats and doves. He consumed industrial quantities of cocaine and cognac and until recently took 42 different drugs a day.

H e survived a direct hit by a plane, has been accused of attempted murder, and “I almost died while riding over a bump on a quad bike at two miles per hour”. When he has surgery, no amount of anaesthetic knocks him out – and his account of a colonoscopy is hysterical. He has sold more than 100 million albums so he’s no fool. I Am Ozzy (Sphere, £20) is a glorious, daft, poignant, preposterous, filthy, lovable book, worthy of its subject. I mean that as high praise.

Jann Parry’s Different Drummer: The Life Of Kenneth MacMillan (Faber, £30) is the biography of the late artistic director of the Royal Ballet. He adapted Romeo And Juliet for Nureyev and Fonteyn. His choreography for his own productions, such as Mayerling and Manon, was crammed with churning eroticism and madness.

When his heroes fling themselves at each other, it is as if we are witnessing “the breakdown of a man who could not meet the expectations of those around him and who was undermined… by the flaws of his own personality”. MacMillan collapsed and died backstage at Covent Garden during one of his own works in 1992. As Parry makes clear, MacMillan was choreographing his own torments. A true Billy Elliot from a Scots working‑class family, he knew turbulence from the cradle. But then the root of great art is often found in pain.

Great author he may have been but in real life Somerset Maugham was a complete monster. So disliked that when he died none of his contemporaries would contribute to a book of essays in his honour. In The Secret Lives Of Somerset Maugham (John Murray, £25) Selina Hastings explores the factors that contributed to his pinched, spiteful personality and its effect on those around him from his wife Syrie and daughter Liza to the friends he cruelly portrayed in his novels and love of his life the dissolute Gerald Haxton.

Gamp VC by Brian Izzard (Haynes, £19.99) is the story of Anthony Miers, an extraordinarily brave man. While still at school his teacher predicted he would either be court-martialed or win the VC. He did both and was also awarded the DSO and Bar. Miers joined the Royal Navy in 1925 as a cadet, entering the submarine service three years later and rising to become a rear-admiral. Nicknamed Gamp after the character in Martin Chuzzlewit, he would ward off tropical storms from the conning tower of his submarine with an umbrella.