Following healthy sales of my Humphrey Bogart biography, Bloomsbury thought a sequel might be worthwhile. We vacillated briefly between Cary Grant and James Stewart as potential subjects, before opting for the latter. The brief was the same: a picture researcher put together a large collection of photographs, and I had to weave a short critical biography around them. This time I was delighted by the choice of actor as it gave me the opportunity to write at some length about Stewart’s films with Alfred Hitchcock, and also to discuss one of my all-time favourite films, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around The Corner.

Despite his famous conservatism, Stewart had always struck me as a complex and introverted actor, whose career dramatises the neurosis and violence at the heart of American values rather than offering a simple celebration of them. I tried to pursue this line of argument by reference to films such as It’s A Wonderful Life (which I’ve never liked), Harvey, Broken Arrow and of course Rear Window and Vertigo. My thesis has not been to everyone’s taste and over the years the book has received some flak from American Jimmy Stewart fans. Nonetheless, I put more of myself into this book than the Humphrey Bogart one, even though the primary objective was the same: to support myself financially during the closing stages of writing What a Carve Up!.