Cleese's dark hold over women

If you read one book this week

Borderline by Liza Marklund (Corgi) R180

Journalists, I've been told, do not make good crime drama protagonists; unlike detectives, they do not have to solve murder cases, and the possibility of missing deadlines is about as risky as it gets in the news game. Not so in Marklund's Nordic noir. Here reporter Annika Bengtzon tracks a serial killer in Stockholm when she hears that her husband, who works for the Swedish government, is kidnapped by extremists in Kenya. Two edge-of-the-seat thrillers in one - and a sardonic observation of modern media to boot. Brilliant.

The issue

Great excitement about John Cleese's forthcoming autobiography, So, Anyway ... (Random House), and chunks of it have appeared in the British Sunday supplements, including an account of how he lost his virginity aged 25 while touring with a West End production. "In July 1964," Cleese writes, "we flew to New Zealand where it was the mid-winter of 1922." The country was "completely clueless" - he tells how a fellow actor had ordered a three-egg omelette for breakfast and was served an omelette with three fried eggs on top of it - but not, apparently, as clueless as Cleese was when it came to women.

"I had no clear idea of what the act needed to be, just a deep intuition that there was some mental button that, if I could ever find and press it, would shove me into a more male persona."

But help was at hand for the awkward comic. "The New Zealand girls were a wholesome and cheery bunch and I must have been losing my stiffness and rigidity (I speak metaphorically) because in Christchurch I met a girl - we'll call her Ann - with whom I felt really relaxed and who thought me hilarious." Their eventual liaison took place at a railway hotel in Auckland.

"I had no idea how to please her, but she seemed perfectly happy, and there was affection, and she only asked me to do my mouse impersonation twice."

Hopefully further reading will reveal the secrets of the mouse impersonation and its dark hold over womenfolk.

Crash course

More great comic writing from the relatively unknown Paul Ewen, whose novel Francis Plug: How To Be A Public Author (Galley Beggar) uses the Man Booker to explore the 21st-century literary world by documenting a series of fictitious happenings at events with real-life authors. The alcoholic Plug is a wonderful creation, deranged and absurd, and his childlike observations are bizarrely funny. Salman Rushdie, for example, has a nose "about the length of a mobile phone" with nostrils "shaped like melting clocks".

The bottom line

"Slavery's frontier was a white man's sexual playground." - The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E Baptist (Basic Books)