Shepperton Babylon - Tapa blanda

If you thought the British film industry was a genteel, conservative sort of business, then think again. This is a history of home-grown movies that includes the scandals, the suicides, the immolations and the contract killings - the product of thousands of conversations with veteran film-makers. Here you'll meet the actress who remembers the night in 1920 when her father cheated her out of a Hollywood contract; the screenwriter who, one night in 1924, watched his film idols snort cocaine from an illuminated glass dance floor on the bank of the Thames at Maidenhead; the movie columnist of the 1930s whose sense of job satisfaction increased with every writ that landed on her editor's desk; the model who escaped Soho's gangsters to become the queen of the nudie flicks; the genteel Scottish comedienne who, at the age of fifty-five, reinvented herself as a star of exploitation cinema, and fondly remembers 'the one where I drilled in people's heads and ate their brains'. A Babel of voices from the lost worlds of British cinema.

Matthew Sweet is a journalist and broadcaster. He has been a columnist for The Big Issue and a director's assistant at the RSC. He holds a doctorate from Oxford University, has contributed to the Oxford Companion to English Literature and edited an edition of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White for Penguin Classics. He is television critic for the Independent on Sunday.