From a little before ten years of age Brian McFarlane became addicted to stories told on the screen, and the mere fact that he had difficulty in getting to see the films he wanted - or any for that matter - only made them seem more alluring. But it wasn't just seeing the films that mattered: he also wanted, and quite soon needed, to be writing about them and these obsessions have been part of his life for the next sixty-odd years.

Real and reel is a light-hearted and but deeply felt account of a lifetime's addiction. It is one particular writer and critic's story, but it will strike sparks among many others. Though many other interests have kept Brian McFarlane's life lively, nothing else has exerted such a long-standing grip on the author's imagination as film.

Editor of the Encyclopaedia of British Cinema, co-editor of Manchester University Press's British Film Makers series, and author of over a dozen critical works on film and adaptation, Brian McFarlane's autobiographical Real and reel can also be read as a biography of the subject of Film Studies itself.