As the son of members of the British Communist party the concept of revolution was common in our house. Luckily my parents never got involved in one – God knows what kind of terrible world they would have built. But I did join a revolution, of a somewhat different kind: in comedy. Thatcher Stole My Trousers is both a description of those heady days and an account of the wider society that provoked our uprising. As the first MC of The Comedy Store, Britain’s original modern comedy club, I led a revolt that tore down the pillars of the smug, lazy, racist and sexist postwar British standup scene and built something new and noble that lasted for months before it began to eat itself from inside.

My work laid the foundation for all the Michael McIntyres, Peter Kays and Jason Manfords who now fill giant arenas – and in my mind they all owe me money. These books cover very different kinds of revolutionary struggle. What they have in common is the effort to radically change the world.

Subtitled “A Simple Tale”, Conrad’s The Secret Agent is a fantastically prescient story of terrorism, double-cross, self-interest, stupidity and class-interest, set in 19th-century London but utterly familiar to anybody, anywhere today. A mentally vulnerable boy blows himself up with a bomb that he has been tricked into carrying by a cunning and ruthless older man and a fanatical professor toasts: “To the destruction of what is!” Sound familiar?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Infiltration … GK Chesterton. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

During my late teens and early 20s I was a member of a Maoist group, one of a large number of such organisations in the UK at the time. The only people who truly bought into our fantasies of seizing power in the name of the proletariat, were the various arms of the security state such as MI5 and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch. It transpired that not only was every revolutionary party riddled with various kinds of spy – all of them unknown to each other – so were all the central committees of the left-wing trade unions. In order to maintain their radical credentials, these men and women pursued highly confrontational policies. Therefore a lot of the militant actions thought of as typical of the era were in fact the work of the security services. Chesterton was writing in 1908, but he tells a startlingly similar story.



We had the collected HG Wells on the booksheIves in our front room, and I loved this particular novel when I was kid, mostly for its Edwardian vision of what the future might look like. It is about a man who accidentally drugs himself and sleeps for 203 years; when he wakes, because of compound interest on his bank accounts, he has become the richest man in the world. The man only known as Graham ends up leading an aeroplane-based revolution against the oppressive powers who rule London.

I would add to Blaise Pascal’s remark that “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone” by saying that a lot of humanity’s problems also stem from mankind’s liability to misunderstand and pervert a really good book. So just as you could not be a reactionary, evangelical Christian and actually follow Christ’s teachings in the Bible, or be a violent jihadi Salafist/Wahhabist and follow the prophet Muhammad’s teachings in the Qur’an, so none of the psychopaths, thieves and personality disorders who led revolutionary communist governments have followed what is actually written in the second-bestselling book ever published (after the Bible), The Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels’s revolutionary summons to the working classes details the nature of the class struggles between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and the problems with capitalism. Read it for yourself. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Struggle … Malcolm X meets supporters at a Halal restaurant in Harlem, New York, c.1965. Photograph: Richard Saunders/Getty Images

Written in collaboration with Alex Haley, who interviewed Malcolm more than 50 times and finished the narrative after Mr X’s death. It is a gripping read from the opening, with the Ku Klux Klan menacing his pregnant mother, through to the troubled last months of his life: we follow Malcolm Little, common thief, on his journey to Malcolm X, inspirational leader. His ambitions for the black civil rights struggle in the US led him to what were then truly revolutionary ambitions for American society. They still are. The grand story also contains a useful security tip: from his years of housebreaking, Malcolm tells us that the best deterrent to being burgled is to leave a bathroom light on. The burglar knows you won’t be up and in the living room at 3am. But he can’t be certain that there isn’t an angry homeowner in the bathroom.

A while ago I reviewed for this paper David Aaronovitch’s memoir Party Animals. Like mine, Aaronovitch’s parents were members of the Communist party of Great Britain (CPGB) and it was astonishing how similar his household was to mine, even down to sadistic “party” dentists. A lot of the characters who featured in Aaronovitch’s childhood also appeared in mine. Betty Ambatielos (formerly Betty Bartlett), communist wife of imprisoned Greek trade unionist Tony Ambatielos for example, or Lin Qui, the elegant Vietnamese journalist and spokeswoman for the Viet Cong, who sometimes sat in our front room in Anfield looking a bit confused over what she was doing there. In his house as in ours, George Orwell was hated; he was hated because he told the truth about the terrible things communists did. We studied Animal Farm in my early years at grammar school and I was both appalled and fascinated by what it revealed about the founding of the Soviet Union. I decided if I was going to be any animal at the farm I’d be the supreme opportunist that is the cat.

7. The Road to Tolerance and Many Other Books by Albert Ellis

Albert Ellis revolutionised psychotherapy, becoming one of the founders of cognitive behavioural therapy after he realised that the conventional psychoanalytical method he had employed up until that point wasn’t helping his clients actually get any better. Ellis was also the first person to say “fuck” and “cunt” while giving a speech at the annual conference of the American Psychiatric Association.

“The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism.” This is generally known as The Big Book and like my two previous selections is also one of the bestselling books of all time. First published in 1939 written by the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill W and Dr Bob. I am not an alcoholic myself but, like every other person in this country, I am connected to people who have this illness and have always been impressed by this book. It is the originator of the much-copied “twelve-step method” widely taken up and used to attempt to treat many addictions. I sometimes wonder if it would be possible to found a political party on the same lines as AA, a programme of honesty and an attitude of live and let live but I guess it would never work.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dilemma … Russian weapon designer Mikhail Kalashnikov with the assault rifle that became ubiquitous in armies and militias worldwide. Photograph: Jens Meyer/AP

My parents had some hippyish views and they tried to stop me having toy guns which of course has given me a lifelong fascination with weaponry. In a society which emphasised the collective the Soviet Union was remarkably keen acknowledge the work of its weapons designers by allowing them to name stuff they had designed after themselves – Illyushin, Dragunov etc (perhaps to spread the blame around a bit). The most feted Soviet weapons designer is Mikhail Kalashnikov, whose assault rifle, though it incorporated aspects of other guns, was both revolutionary in itself and a favourite of a lot of revolutionaries. The Gun raises an interesting moral dilemma both for the author and the reader over whether it is ethical to write or to read an affectionate account of a device that could be considered inherently evil.

The Quiet American is set in Vietnam during the revolutionary war against French colonialism. In it Greene perfectly skewers the kind of idealistic but profoundly ignorant and inflexible American ideologue who would later go on to cause such havoc with their meddling in the Middle East. At least the young American idealist Alden Pyle is murdered, whereas his descendants, the Rumsfelds, Paul Bremers and their British cousins the Blairs, Straws and Hains have been allowed to live on in splendid denial of their wrongdoing.