A Day Like Today
John Humphrys
(William Collins, 416 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Over the years I’ve frequently been asked, “What is John Humphrys really like?” People assume I’ll know because I’ve sat opposite him in BBC Radio 4’s Today studio while broadcasting in the “Thought for the Day” slot. They usually think he’s the rottweiler of interviewing, one of the BBC’s most distinguished journalists, extremely grumpy and hostile to religion. I’d say the first three are true, but not the last (of which more later). My questioners can now make up their own minds by reading Humphrys’ valedictory A Day Like Today, published after his retirement from the flagship morning news programme.

What’s unfortunate about this memoir is that it focuses so much on Today at the expense of Humphrys’ many years as a foreign correspondent. I wanted to read much more about his covering Richard Nixon during Watergate, the dying days of Rhodesia and the last gasp of apartheid in South Africa. His first BBC job in the early 1960s was in Liverpool, which he calls “the most exciting beat in Britain for a reporter in those days”, yet he gives it just 10 paragraphs.