Kevin Jackson recounts that experience in addition to giving a full account of the film's production. But chiefly he analyses the mood and magic of the film, its aesthetics and sensibility, seeking to show, without ever detracting from the film's comic brilliance, just how much more there is to Withnail & I than drunkenness and swearing. 'It is an outstandingly touching yet witheringly unsentimental drama of male friendship,' Jackson writes, 'a bleak up-ending of the English pastoral dream, a piece of ferocious verbal inventiveness' - and, without question, one of the greatest of all British films.

KEVIN JACKSON is a writer, broadcaster andfilm-maker. His books include Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One (2012), and BFI Film Classics on Withnail & I (2004) and Lawrence of Arabia (2007). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Companion of the Guildof St George, and a Regent of the College de Pataphysique and a regularcontributor to BBC radio programmes, including BBC Radio 4's 'Saturday Review'.