Madonna was not best pleased to be called a “whiny old barmaid” by her friend Rupert Everett in his memoir Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, published in 2006. Result: he was her friend no longer, which some might think was more her loss than his.

It certainly meant, however, that the actor was unable to ask for any financial favours from her later in the year when he joined Ross Kemp, Alastair Campbell, Danny Baker and Piers Morgan in a celebrity version of TV’s The Apprentice in aid of Comic Relief.

“You’ve got to call Madonna,” Morgan had ordered. “Well, she’s not really talking to me at the moment,” Everett replied. “What am I going to tell her?” “She’s got to give us a lot of money.” “She won’t like that . . .”

In the event, the matter was not put to the test, because Everett walked out of the programme on day one. A reluctant recruit in the first place, having submitted to the blandishments of Comic Relief’s Richard Curtis and his partner Emma Freud, he knew nothing of the show’s format and had no idea how intrusive the cameras would prove to be.

The episode is described in full comic detail in Everett’s latest volume of autobiography Vanished Years, just published by Little, Brown at £20. I read about it first in a lengthy extract from the book printed in the Daily Mail. My laughter as I did so, on a flight back from a holiday in Greece, attracted some odd glances from passengers in the seats around me.

Everett’s funniest conceit is to pretend that he thought the show’s taskmaster was the comedian Sid James. That Lord Sugar does indeed strongly resemble the late Carry On star can hardly be denied.

Putting the boot in with his usual deftness, Everett describes how “Alan introduced himself . . . with that blunt insolence peculiar to all barrow-boy billionaires”. Ouch!

In a bizarre ending to the story, the actor heads out of London to recuperate with his grandmother in North Norfolk. Sitting opposite him in the train is Clement Freud, Emma’s father. “My life was turning into The Lady Vanishes. Any minute now I would disappear without trace.”

Everett’s capacity for waspish wit elegantly expressed is illustrated in Vanished Years at the expense of other celebrities.

The historian Simon Schama, travelling with him in an executive jet chartered by media star Tina Brown, is appraised with a critical, envious eye. “Is he a queen? Actually, he isn’t. He’s one of those peculiar fey straights, a male lesbian, more dangerous even than the lesbian herself. (When riled.) He is impassioned by the surrounding clutch of adoring women and sprays them with words and champagne saliva.”

Among his friends death stalks with a worrying alacrity. In Red Carpets... he covered the premature passing of Paula Yates, the Marquess of Bristol and Piers Flint-Shipman, who appeared with him in his first stage success, Julian Mitchell’s Another Country. (I knew all of these, plus various of Everett’s Ampleforth College contemporaries, which convinces me that I probably met him, too, in the long-ago 1980s.) In Vanished Years he offers an affecting account of the life, and untimely death by her own hand, of the fashion guru Isabella Blow. His description of her funeral in Gloucester Cathedral is masterly.

In fact, his evocation of events and places is every bit as excellent as his presentation of people. Included here is a compelling description of a visit to Lourdes with his ailing dad and an unforgettable portrait of Berlin conjured up through its associations with Christopher Isherwood.

“Late at night, if you close your eyes, you can still hear the ghostly whistles of young men calling from the smoggy streets to their girls in the vast flats above, where lights twinkle and the tomblike walnut beds are turned down for the night.” Superb.