This may be premature as it’s only August, but I think I’ve read my book of the year. It’s Me: The Authorised Biography by Byron Rogers. I can’t remember when I last read anything that gave me so much pleasure or made me laugh aloud so often. There were passages, too, that moved me closer to tears than laughter – one about Rogers’s father, another about a friend who went mad and died young.
It’s immodestly titled because, the author explains, someone once tried to steal his identity and the book is his way of reclaiming it. But it’s as much about the characters Byron Rogers has encountered – first as a child in Nonconformist Wales, then as a journalist in Sheffield and London – as it is about the man himself. Among them are Mrs Jepson, curator of a freak show including The One-Eyed Pig with the Elephant’s Nose; the Last Man to See Lord Byron; Dr Crippen’s mistress; and the Prince of Wales.
Byron Rogers was still writing regularly for the Telegraph travel section when I joined it. Although we’ve spoken on the phone a few times,  I don’t think we’ve ever met. His byline never appeared on a piece from overseas; he didn’t need to travel far from his front door in Northamptonshire to find something worth writing about and worth reading. He could, and did, make even the job of a railway timetable compiler into a compelling piece – as I discovered recently when combing the Telegraph archives for a book on great rail journeys; a book that, coincidentally, will be published by the company that publishes Rogers.
He hasn’t written for the Telegraph in ages, and I’m not entirely sure why. The stories he wrote for our desk were never quite travel stories, and certainly never the sort of thing that could be sold in a conference soundbite, but the way they were written always made you want to read them. The same is true of Me. It’s not quite an autobiography, but who cares when it’s so well done?