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knack of losing car keys (and his possible descent from John of Gaunt), Guy Hamilton’s system for assessing the rough-cut of a picture, Alex Salkind’s consideration of Muhammad Ali for the role of Superman (it’s a fact, I was there), and Oliver Reed’s unique method of crossing the Danube—as well as his thoughts on Steve McQueen, and vice versa.
    And other phenomena and personalities. Looking back on Hollywood, Pinewood, Cinecittà, and various other studios and locations from Culver City to the mountaintops of Yugoslavia, I find some of it hard to believe, but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
    That, then, is the purport of this book, some of which was written as long as twenty-odd years ago, and has been waiting until I had time to finish it and arrange it in some sort of order; it’s fairly random and haphazard, but at least it’s true. It won’t please everyone, I know, but those of ultra-liberal views can console themselves with the thought that my kind won’t be around much longer, and then they can get on with wrecking civilisation in peace; in the meantime (assuming they’ve read this far) they should stick this volume back on the bookshop shelves and turn to recipes about aubergines or shrub cultivation or political memoirs.
    For the rest of you, I hope I strike a chord, and that you find the movie stuff as much fun as I did.

    * I am taking this opportunity to thank any readers who may be kind enough to write to me about this book, whether in approval or deep damnation, because I doubt if I’ll have the energy to reply to their letters. I’m not being churlish, but life’s too short, honestly, and the postage costs a fortune. 
    * Just for interest, there is a mistaken belief that the terms Left and Right in politics originated in the French National Assembly during the Revolution. In fact, Edward Gibbon, writing before the Revolution, used the words to indicate the radical and conservative sides in Church politics, as the following quotation from his Decline and Fall makes clear: “The bishops…were attached to the faith of Cyril, but in the face of the synod, in the heat of the battle, the leaders…passed from the right to the left wing, and decided the victory by this seasonable desertion.”
    * To quote the wise old judge: “Reform? Reform? Are things not bad enough as they are?”

SHOOTING SCRIPT 1

“One For All, and All for Fun”
    M Y CAR , an ageing Vauxhall Cresta, broke down within a few yards of the Sizzler Restaurant, Onchan, Isle of Man, where Richard Lester and I had been discussing my possible participation in a new film version of The Three Musketeers , which left us facing a walk of about a mile along Douglas Promenade to his hotel. No way to treat an eminent film director, and I wondered if he might be offended to the extent of getting another writer—I didn’t know him in those days, or realise that to a man who’d made two movies with the Beatles, a mile walk along a surf-lashed coast in the middle of the night in late December was a mere bagatelle.
    All I could suggest was that we push the rotten vehicle to the top of a nearby slope, and then leap in, free-wheeling downhill to a point reasonably close to his destination; he sportingly agreed, we heaved and strained and sprang aboard at the psychological moment, coasting down and fetching up, with Richard sitting patiently and me crying: “Roll, you bastard!” not far from home.
    That was when I asked him (eager to know if he was still talking to me): “How d’you want the Musketeers—straight, or sent up?” I knew his reputation for offbeat comedy, and was by no means sure that I could give him what he wanted. He responded with perhaps the nicest reply a screenwriter ever received: “I want it written by the man who wrote Flashman .”
    I didn’t know, then, just how astonishingly lucky I was. It wasthe week between Christmas and New Year, 1972, I had three novels, a history, and a short-story collection