The few people in any generation who make a lasting difference usually do it with bullets or ballots or some kind of erectile dysfunction pill. Michael Palin and his five famous partners in the legendary comedy group Monty Python (Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam) did it with some Spam, a few knights who say “Ni!” and a song about a lumberjack with bizarre hobbies.

Palin recently released Diaries 1969-1979, a book that compiles his diary entries from the birth and rise of Python and beyond. It’s also probably the first and last diary to contain the line, “And next to me was John Cleese, also in a bikini.”

“John Cleese was often next to people in bikinis,” Palin said in a phone interview. “He was probably in Mao’s diary as well.”

Aside from the entries on Cleese’s swimwear, Palin’s work is a unique primary source for Python devotees, detailing not only the genesis of the group but also the creative tension between the members.

“Python was a difficult thing,” he said in a phone interview. “It was like riding a pedigree horse bareback. On a great day, it’ll be going really fast and smooth, and it’ll be a beautiful thing to watch. And on the next day, it’ll throw you off.”

In fact, Palin was convinced that Python was finished about five different times throughout the course of the diaries. Those mistaken judgments, as well as his other worries and gripes, make for a surprisingly honest — if sometimes genially unexciting — picture of fame. A day-to-day account isn’t always thrilling, but it doesn’t need to be.

“I love reading diaries because they ramble,” Palin said. “Good diaries build up into a real portrait of somebody. Here, I

think you do get a feeling of things as they were happening: raw prejudices, sort of hasty, intemperate judgments and excitement as well.”

As a truly in-the-moment account, what Palin leaves out of his entries tells us nearly as much as what he puts in. There’s nothing on the creation of the “Lumberjack Song.” Palin said the song “was written in about fifteen minutes at the end of the day” because “we were just doing a sketch show that we thought would have a life of a couple of years, if that.”

In the end, of course, Palin was wrong about that too, much to the benefit of college kids in need of a movie to quote and all the programs Python made creatively possible, from South Park to Saturday Night Live. The diaries reveal the process of a revolution from its most daring moments to its most mundane. As Palin says in his introduction, “in the course of these diaries I grow up, my family grows up and Monty Python grows up. It was a great time to be alive.”

Michael Palin will discuss his diaries at the First Parish Meetinghouse in Cambridge on Friday, September 7 at 7:00 p.m. Palin will also introduce a screening of And Now For Something Completely Different at the Brattle Theatre at 9:30 p.m. Check out harvard.com or brattlefilm.org for more information.