The hell of being Michael Palin

In these diaries, which I found excellent in a very specific way, Michael Palin tells us about his life between the late 1980s and the late 1990s. At the start of this period, he was about to become a hugely successful presenter of travel programmes. Ten years later, he was wondering if this was, in fact, what he wanted to be. ‘Should I accept that this is what I’m best suited for?’, he writes. Or should he try to do something else, like be an ‘arts presenter’ or a novelist? His own verdict: ‘I don’t know.’

Palin is obviously a man of great qualities. For instance, he’s almost always an optimist, but never a bore. He’s clever, he’s charming, he has good taste. But he has something else, too, and he has this thing in such abundance that it’s become the main quality he’s known for. He tells us he likes to be liked.