RaveDaily Mail (UK)Putting The Rabbit In The Hat is one of the best showbiz memoirs ever written, but its quality comes at the expense of the feelgood froth that usually fills such books. Cox is as honest here as he is on stage and screen ... The book has a kind of brutal integrity ... Everyone loves a rags-to-riches story, and Cox is highly informative about the craft of his art. But the account of his climb up the theatrical ladder...is the dullest bit of the book ... More entertainingly, Cox constantly carps at other stars ... The book isn’t all agitprop. It’s as funny as it is furious ... Cox quotes advice from the director Lindsay Anderson: ‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ Brian Cox has done everything, and with this book he leaves everyone else standing.
Tony Judt
RaveThe ExpressWhether Judt was grateful for being left compos mentis cannot but be a moot point but given the breadth of knowledge and quality of thought bodied forth in The Memory Chalet his readers can have no such doubts ... We should all be thankful his brain kept working even as the disease did everything it could to deprive him of a world to work upon ... Anyone who wants to begin learning about what is going on in the Middle East or why Marxism failed could do a lot worse than start here ... Yet there is a lot more to The Memory Chalet than the political history that made Judt’s name.
