John Cleese's Reading List

"This book has, more than any others, explained things I have been puzzled by for decades, in particular the shortcomings of pure intellectualism."

"As a child I read mainly about animals and cricket. I consumed the Doctor Dolittle books, and Elleston Trevor's Deep Wood and Badger's Moon, and Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows."

"In my teens I read adventure novels. I loved Conan Doyle's books about Brigadier Gerard, the Horatio Hornblower stories, Alexandre Dumas's swashbucklers, Rafael Sabatini's pirate romps, and John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps."

"It's the only truly funny book I've read, apart from Three Men in a Boat, which my father's generation revered."

"It's the only truly funny book I've read, apart from Three Men in a Boat, which my father's generation revered."

"The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt, is the most important book I've come across about the ever-advancing polarization of all aspects of our world. Its clarity is stunning."

"A wildly entertaining book about probability, which left me ultimately deflated by my complete ignorance of chance, or luck, and what an astonishing huge part that plays in our lives."

"This is probably the most interesting, most important book I’ve ever read. McGilchrist is a quite extraordinary man. He taught English at Oxford but decided he didn’t like the way people talked about poetry. So he became a psychiatrist, and worked on the neuro-imaging of the brain. His book is about the brain’s distinct hemispheres. He believes that they have different ways of living, of being in life, and that, in our present civilization, they’ve fallen out of balance."

"To me, Karl Popper is the best philosopher of science of the last century. This little book taught me more about the philosophy of science than any other."

"It’s been many years since I read this one, but I can still remember certain sequences: men riding horseback into battle, and the way they try to distract themselves from the fact that they could be dead or wounded terribly in an hour’s time."

"Wolfe’s big novel about 1980s New York City is an absolutely superb book. It delighted me, and told me so much about a certain part of American society."

"Nicoll, a British psychiatrist, was a pupil of Armenian philosopher and mystic George Gurdjieff. His multi-volume book contains, I think, the best advice on understanding one’s own psychology as looked at through the Esoteric Christian tradition."

"I met Amis once and liked him very much. He was rather sour, but he wrote beautifully, and he did really manage to describe certain personalities. His first novel is about a fellow called Dixon, a history lecturer at a minor university. Dixon has wonderfully funny fantasies, and Margaret, his sometime girlfriend, is one of the most awful human beings in fiction. I remember reading this by the side of a swimming pool in Spain, and I was really quite bothering the people around me because I kep..."