They don’t make ’em like they used to. Hearty and hale even as he approaches his 90th year, Lyttelton is a national institution – or ought to be. For as long as most of us can remember, he has chaired BBC Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue with his charm, warmth and wit. Meanwhile, his jazz band plays on.

True to Lyttelton’s endearing idiosyncrasy, this is not a conventional memoir but rather a “random hotchpotch of thoughts and experiences that have occurred to me over the years”. This reader could have done without Lyttelton’s puerile concentration on Louis Armstrong’s fondness for laxatives. Surely there are other things about such greatness that he could have told us of? That aside, this odd memoir is pitch perfect, and utterly its own.

Self-deprecation is a lovely, but dying, English trait. It would be Lyttelton’s coda. His name Humphrey “seems sort of stuffy and, were there such an adjective, upholstery, like the padding on some rather musty old boarding-house sofa”. Courage is also not what it was, and Lyttelton’s typically modest account of his participation in the Salerno landing of the Second World War shows that he has courage indeed. There is sadness in these pages too: “War is destructive in ways that reach far beyond the obvious.” There is dignity, wisdom, and all the laughter of a wonderful man who will, no doubt, be playing a cheerful rag at the sounding of his last trumpet.

It Just Occured to Me....: The reminiscences and thoughts of chairman Humph by Humphrey Lyttelton

Robson, £7.99

Buy the book here for the offer price of £7.59 (free p&p)

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