Twenty years ago Sir Alec Guinness met a small boy who said he had seen the newly released film Star Wars more than 100 times, and was thrilled to meet Obi-Wan Kenobi in the flesh. 'I would love you to do something for me,' Guinness told him. 'Anything, anything,' said the child to his hero. 'Do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again.' The boy burst into tears; his mother glared.
Some random facts about Guinness: he doesn't have a video; he cares about crocuses; he notices when the Union Flag is upside down. He believes his memory is going and can be funny about it; he feels a sense of telepathy with Merula, his wife of more than 60 years; he gains an intense pleasure from reading. He cannot escape Star Wars.
He liked Baz Luhrman's punk version of Romeo And Juliet. 'What a relief it is,' he writes, 'to listen to American accents dealing with Shakespeare. They sound much more authentic than our own over-refined or suburban efforts.' The worst Romeo in history he claims for himself, in Perth, in 1939 and a red wig. As he struck a romantic pose of extreme yearning, the balcony fell off 'to reveal, gasping with astonishment, [Juliet] in her nightie'.
The whole book is like that - something happens in the present (somewhere between 1996 and 1998, so it includes Princess Diana's death, the Labour Party's election victory and the return of two favourite birds to the garden) which sparks off memories. He is reminded variously about caterpillars, lost chapels, John Gielgud, odd Hollywood parties (in which Guinness appears rather like a stranger in mock-paradise, never quite belonging but always observing), or the time in Greece in 1939 when he nearly crashed into a car carrying Goebbels and Goering - leaving him wondering whether his death then might have postponed the war.
The book is not easy to define. As its author says, 'It states it is a Journal and yet it doesn't quite aspire to that and it isn't a diary. Not many dates are to be found in it. It is, I suppose, like a sort of sluggish river meandering hopefully towards the open sea but diverted by various eddies, pools or tangential tributaries.' One of those takes us to a crossing of the Atlantic on the QE2 with the outrageous actress Bea Lilie, 'a small-scale clown of genius' who got into a heated argument with a fuddy-duddy American couple. They threatened to call the steward. 'You just call the steward,' she said. 'He's a good friend of mine. He's called Eric. Whenever we meet we always have sex, whatever the weather.' It is not all theatre talk: other various eddies take us to the Carmargue, where Guinness sees a face that fascinates him, to a bizarre dinner party in Paris with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor or into the pages of Dickens and Trollope.
You can hear that famous voice speaking throughout - and it sounds chatty, educated, graciously self-deprecating and occasionally, just occasionally, jaded.
