Though he'd have you believe he was an aristocratic orphan left in the jungle and raised by monkeys, Roger Lewis was in fact born in industrial South Wales in the last century, educated in Scotland, and became a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, at the age of twenty-four.

His book The Life and Death of Peter Sellers was made into the Golden Globe and Emmy award-winning film by HBO, starring Geoffrey Rush and Charlize Theron. Lewis, who in 2010 received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters, divides his time between a collapsing Georgian property in the Herefordshire Balkans and a flat above a dirndl shop in the imperial spa town of Bad Ischl, near Salzburg in Austria. When in London he is reliably to be found in Rules, the charming old-world restaurant in Covent Garden.