Brian Cox has produced one of the funniest, most rip-roaring, irreverent and candid showbusiness memoirs this season, full of lively mockery.

This volume is simply a delight, so much so that it’s tempting to consume it in one sitting. It’s snarky and cutting in a sometimes take-no-prisoners way as befits a waif brought up poor on the hardscrabble streets of Dundee, Scotland, but almost always funny.

I was desperate for tidbits to tide me over during the long wait for Season 4 [of Succession. Well, there aren’t many.

Piquant, digressive.

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.

As an actor, Brian Cox can convince his audience of anything.

It helps, when you’re reading an autobiography, if you can hear the author’s voice. Brian Cox’s rasping tones bellow forth from the pages of Putting the Rabbit in the Hat.

What explains the gruff-meets-bitchy tone of Putting the Rabbit in the Hat? Cox grew up poor in Dundee, Scotland, and is now 75 years old. Being willing to speak directly and with expertise, even or especially when the subject doesn’t want to hear it, is almost a moral tenet of his generation.

Candid and engaging.

His memoir is both an entertaining and anecdotal tour through his career and a perceptive piece of introspection on his personal life.

Cox is probably better known by his fellow United Kingdom audience, which makes his new memoir, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, a bit of a one-trick pony. The vast majority of people he writes about will be unfamiliar to all but the most ardent theater fans.

Candid.

Wisdom, a modicum of modesty, and delicious gossip make for an entertaining memoir..