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Books

Paul Merton’s is the most boastful autobiography in years

A review of ‘Only When I Laugh: My Autobiography’, by Paul Merton. He writes candidly about his psychiatric incarceration but, elsewhere, there’s too much swanking

27 September 2014

8:00 AM

27 September 2014

8:00 AM

Only When I Laugh: My Autobiography Paul Merton

Ebury Press, pp.344, £20, ISBN: 9780091949358

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.

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