Failure is the very stuff of comedy, but not of showbiz memoirs, so Small Man in a Book (Michael Joseph, £20) is unusual. Rob Brydon’s success came quite late, with Marion and Geoff in 2001, when he was 35, after an ‘era of terrible job after terrible job’, and it makes a happy ending to his book, which is otherwise a gently amusing account of his long and gruelling Kampf.