Twenty years ago at a wedding more than usually star-studded in attendance I found myself seated during the munching and swigging part of the event next to Douglas Adams, of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame. He spent the afternoon on his mobile telephone, receiving a ball-by-ball Test Match commentary from a mate at Lord’s (or wherever).

This at once revealed to me the writer’s passion for cricket, a rich man’s indifference to matters of economy and a regrettable disregard for the conventions of good manners. In addition, it demonstrated Adams’s enthusiasm for gadgets at the cutting edge of technology.

This is a passion shared by his long-time pal Stephen Fry. He, too, was present at the wedding, though I feel pretty sure there would have been no sighting of his ‘mobile’, as these useful devices were not then called. (‘Mobile’ at the time meant a light structure of metal, plastic or cardboard that may be hung so as to turn freely — a decoration, in fact.) Stephen is far too much of a gentleman to have shamed himself in this way. No reader of his new volume of autobiography could be in any doubt of that. The Fry Chronicles (Michael Joseph, £20) proves him almost insanely possessed of a desire to please, to do and say ‘the right thing’, to be liked. It shows him also — and this quickly starts to grate with the reader — embarrassed about the fame and fortune he enjoys.

On Page 224, for instance he writes: “I know that money, power, prestige and fame do not bring happiness [Oh no! please let me try!] . . . It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading a high life, an enviable life, a privileged life are as miserable most days as anybody else . . .”

Let us not hear it then — please, Stephen.

The book possesses so much that is enjoyable, however, that I feel I cannot do other than recommend it highly.

Its best features are a wealth of wonderful anecdotes, the nice things it says about people I like (including Simon Raven and his novels), and the digs at those I don’t — or possibly don’t, my having previously had no view on them at all.

Robbie Coltrane comes in this category. I had regarded him only as a fat bad actor. Now I know him to be a fat bad actor who misrepresents his background. Having made disobliging references to Fry in the past — of the ‘toffs versus us’ variety — he now suffers the full blast of his ire.

Fry points out that Coltrane went to the same school as the Duke of Argyle, Prince Georg Frederich of Prussia and the Earl of Elgin. “That he managed to enter Glasgow School of Art as Anthony Robert McMillan with an accent like Prince Charles’s and emerge the other end with an accent like Jimmy Boyle’s is a fine achievement.” Ouch!

On a kinder vein, I loved his tale about Alistair Cooke shaking his hand during his student days and telling him that, in so doing, this connected him with Bertrand Russell, Robert Browning and Napoleon.

‘As he left,” writes Fry, “he tucked an envelope in my pocket. It was a cheque for £2,000 [What was? the envelope? Tut, tut, Stephen] made out to the Cambridge Mummers. On a compliments slip with it he had written, ‘A small proportion to be spent on production, the rest for wine and senseless riot’.”

This seems a very happy note on which to conclude.