To The Last Page

I should mention upfront that Roger Keen is a friend – at least in the Facebook sense if not of the "inner circle" type that he refers to in his book – and I have met him a couple of times. This is not as an excuse for giving his book a favourable review, which it richly deserves on its own merits (I purchased it myself and didn't not receive it as a gift or with the expectation of a review), but to point out that Roger, as anyone who knows him or has perhaps even read one of his film reviews on the internet will testify, is ever inch the perfect gentleman. Quiet, polite, soft-spoken, gracious and congenial with an intelligent and positive outlook, reluctant to criticise when there are favourable points that can be made – Roger is nothing, in other words, like the paranoid, LSD-tripping, dope-smoking, alcohol-fuelled aggressive, surrealist, hippy dopehead artist of the 1970s that he writes about in The Mad Artist , a fictionalised memoir of a past that I suspect that few