I can imagine a quiz question along the lines of ‘What do Shylock, Lady Bracknell, Sigmund Freud and Hercule Poirot have in common?’ The answer, of course, would be David Suchet, who has impersonated all these characters on stage or television during an acting career spanning half a century.

In Behind the Lens, Suchet offers a series of autobiographical sketches, written in an amiably informal style and covering many aspects of his professional and personal life.