Written with just the right mix of warmth and candour, and in a prose style that is the literary equivalent of his easy-going, up-front persona, this is hugely enjoyable. A super book that informs as much as it entertains

It has taken two decades to get a man back on the Moon, and the man is Michael Caine. Niven's influence as a writer runs rights through it...some genuinely vintage laughs

Caine gives his public value for money, covering his whole life with David Nivenish charm

He writes superbly about his family, about his homosexuality, about the agonies of childhood ... some of his bursts of simile take the breath away ... his most satisfying and appealing book so far

This is one of the most extraordinary and affecting biographies I have read . . . Stephen is . . . painfully honest when trying to grapple with his ever-present demons, and often, as you might expect, very funny

The writing is rhapsodic, intoxicated and very touching

[A] wonderful, self-lacerating autobiography

He has produced a remarkable autobiography . . . It makes gripping, sometimes unbearably sad, sometimes confusing reading . . . exhilarating, humane, zany, literary

No one can make you feel quite like Stephen Fry can . . . Funny and tormentedly frank

Hugely enjoyable . . . compulsively readable . . . Fry is excellent on the details of memory, too, and always able to embellish them with effortless erudition . . . this engaging, engrossing read is as honest a portrait of a young liar as one could hope to read

He is bubbly, funny and charming, and he gives his fans plenty of material if they want to speculate on why he is both so gifted and so wayward

The jokes . . . transcend the complexes of the joker, turning the Stephenesque into a national as well as a family treasure

Not so much an autobiography, more a way of life; discursive, funny, sometimes almost unbelievably sad, opinionated, nostalgic and very infectious

Fry can be funny about anything

So charming and so acute that one cannot help forgiving him