Michael Palin
Paul Scott's Raj Quartet kept me going through the entire shoot of Life of Brian in Tunisia. It wasn't exactly a holiday but it was in a holiday location and I was there for eight weeks so needed something substantial to see me through. Though it was a work of fiction it seemed much more grounded in reality than anything we were doing during the day. And maybe its theme of the decline of British rule helped me more than I think as I played Pontius Pilate being laughed at by a thousand hysterical Palestinians.
Michael Palin's latest travel book New Europe is published by Phoenix.

Jenny Eclair
When I was 22 I met the man I am still with today and he took me on my first “relationship” holiday - we went to Corfu. I was anorexic so food was a problem but we found somewhere that did a grilled prawn starter that I felt I could manage, I ate it every night for two weeks. I took a book of short stories by John Cheever, it made me feel very grown up, and want to write short stories like him - I wanted to be John Cheever. One night, after a bottle of Retsina, I wrote him a letter - I never sent it, it was drunken and rambling. The book had nothing to do with Greece or me, but it still felt like a rite of passage.
Grumpy Old Couples by Jenny Eclair and Judith Holder is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Richard Hammond
I went to the Lake District with my now wife, Mindy. It was our first little holiday together. It wasn't glamorous, camping near Lake Buttermere and we walked about in the rain. But habitually I travel - and it's terribly cheesy - with a copy of Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. I can recite every word. You reach that point when the sharks have been beating the hell out of his fish, he's trying to make his way home and he suddenly has this coppery taste in his mouth. He leans over the gunnel and spits into the water and says: “Eat that galanos. And make a dream you killed a man.” And every time I read that line I choke.Richard Hammond's latest book Car Science is published by Dorling Kindersley.

Patricia Routledge
I first went to Europe in 1953. It was a glorious summer, a magical holiday in Dinard in Brittany. I hired a bike and biked along the coast and I would take my book with me, How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn. It is the story of a Welsh mining village, the lives of the people and the disasters that happened, and how it affected and changed them. I wept a great deal but I couldn't bear it to be over, that I do remember very clearly. One had a great regard for the trials and the dangers of the miners lives and for what their families went through and it was made vibrantly clear in this very well written book.
Patricia Routledge is on tour with a revival of Royce Ryton's 1972 play Crown Matrimonial.

Lynda La Plante
This year over the Easter holidays I went to the Isles of Scilly and stayed in St Martins Hotel, the most special place. I didn't have much time to read, even though I had taken a vast selection of books, and this time I made a point of not taking my usual research material, just my own manuscript to edit. But I became enthralled by The Lost King of France by Deborah Cadbury, the true story of the fate of Louis XVII, son of Marie Antoinette. It's an extraordinary detective story, spanning 200 years, but also a moving and dramatic account of a pivotal moment in French history. This compelling book involves pretenders to the crown, royalist plots and palace intrigues.
Clean Cut by Lynda La Plante is published by Pocket Books.

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