A fascinating documentary ensues of Lean's mother's Tangye-Cornish background, which was lower middle class or was it middle class? In pre-great-war Britain one had to get this right there were as many class subdivisions as points on a compass. You feel he is there watching when Lean was born to Quaker parents in a three-storey yellow-brick house in South Croydon. For instance, he never says Lean was dyslexic but details the symptoms and invites the reader to make the diagnosis. His research is meticulous and he does not make claims that cannot be substantiated. I recall in 1962 the startled reaction of Bessie Love, the great silent film star, when Brownlow asked her to confirm the name of a second assistant cameraman back in 1912: 'Don't you ever live in the present, Kevin?' All biography is to some extent history but Brownlow's is more history than most. Brownlow has never been part of the feature film establishment but as his histories- books, films and notably his reconstruction of Abel Gance's Napoleon - show, in his mind he lives and breathes Lean's own era. At first sight it seems an odd choice but it turned out to be brilliant casting. Initially Lean had asked Brownlow to help him write his autobiography. His dyslexia took him straight to pictures.

Lindsay Anderson once said that it took him ten years to get over Oxford and become a film-maker. She was wrong he managed it somehow, but he did turn away from words. Kevin Brownlow recounts in his epic, David Lean, that when Lean was seven his mother told him that his teacher prophesied that 'you will never be able to read or write'. The film industry has limped on, sometimes defiantly sometimes wearily, in the margins of commerce and culture, attracting dreamers, riff-raff, aristocrats, outcasts, crooks, poets, failures and, in the words of an egregious financier, 'people with zed in their name'.

David lean kevin brownlow