There are times when you read a book and you just know it’s something a bit special. Such is the case with Nick Asbury’s ‘Exit Pursued by a Badger’, published by Oberon Books.

And for a book to be a bit special it has to have the power – and be superbly well written of course – to reach out to its reader and impart not only knowledge, but humanity, grace and truth. You’ll find it in the major works of D.H. Lawrence, Proust, Hemingway, Tolstoy, James Joyce, and Doris Lessing.

But you will also, and more often, find it in the smaller works: usually in the slimmer volumes of memoirs. This is certainly true of Hemingway’s ‘A Moveable feast’; W. Somerset Maugham’s ‘A Writer’s Notebook’; William Saroyan’s ‘Days of Life and Death and Escape to the Moon’; Denys Val Baker’s ‘The Sea’s in the Kitchen’; Willie The Lion Smith’s ‘Music on My Mind’; and Geoff Dyer’s brilliant ‘Out of Sheer Rage’. You will also find it in Nick Asbury’s wonderful book.

Before you start emailing me I know I haven’t mentioned any of the excellent books written by actors and directors about acting and directing. And there have been some good ones, most especially those by Antony Sher, Simon Callow, and Timothy West; but Nick Asbury’s volume is different, because it’s a book that is not just about acting (and putting on one of the most courageous and memorable pieces of theatre the RSC, or any other theatre company, has probably ever done), but also about living, and writing about living, which is what all the books mentioned above are about. In other words the art of living and working well, and the art of writing well about how you live and work well.

Here’s a small example of Nick’s almost throw away writing skill:

‘Deep and dark into rehearsals for Henry V.
Monday morning, fresh from a weekend of
slavish devotion to line learning. Honest.
Well, a few lines followed by the hoovering.
Followed by a few more lines and the windows
are now sparkling.
The line-learning thing is very good for boring chores
as it allows me to go through them whilst not getting
distracted elsewhere. That is, of course, until the call
of the wild hits and I bolt for a bottle of wine. Nothing
much seems to stay in the head after that. Believe me, I’ve tried.’

Now that’s good writing: the sort that tells a great deal in very few words, conjuring up images in the way of a poet or song writer.

‘Exit Pursued by a Badger – An Actor’s Journey through History with Shakespeare’, to give the book its full title, is a book you’ll read quickly. You may try and read it slowly, attempting to savour each and every sentence, but you won’t be able to because Nick pushes the narrative on at a cracking pace, which may have something to do with the fact that it was originally written as a blog – written fast, and usually at the end of a a gruelling day of rehearsals and performances. And that’s not so different to Hemingway at his best: writing newspaper reports under shell fire, or Somerset Maugham writing quickly after a hard day as a trainee doctor; using the left-over adrenalin to get it all down, clearly and well.

As that little snippet above shows, Nick’s book is also very funny. It’s also very emotional and very inclusive, not unlike those superb RSC productions he’s writing about from the inside. And that’s another thing – he writes from the inside, from the heart.

What you won’t do is read this book just once. You’ll go back to it again and again, because Nick Asbury has written a small literary jewel that will become a classic.