Paul Merton’s is the most boastful autobiography in years

Has there ever been a nun or a priest who wasn’t a bent sadist? Because here we go again. At school Paul Merton was terrorised by a nun who, in her black outfit with a white band, ‘looked like an angry pint of Guinness’. She walloped the future comedian if ever she detected an imaginative strain in his English compositions. ‘You can’t write about things that aren’t true,’ asserted this believer in the actuality of virgin births and rising from the dead. For stating that Beethoven invented rice pudding and Mozart baked the first crème brûlée, Merton was told he’d ‘poisoned the minds of your classmates with your ridiculous stories’.

Of course, Merton has been poisoning and entertaining us ever since. His formal education further blighted by the Jesuits — who believed that pain could be equated with learning, and that the only way to teach algebra was with the strap — Merton left his secondary school in Wimbledon and joined the civil service in Tooting.