The title [A Postillion Struck by Lightning] is rather dowdy, for a film-star's memoirs…. But this is a very different sort of book, deliberately avoiding humorous anecdotes and name-dropping. Dirk Bogarde has attempted to present certain episodes in his life as chapters in a poetic novel, and one often suspects that he has bent the facts towards fiction….

Look up the reference to Virginia Woolf [mentioned in the index] and you find she is the lonely, creepy lady who disturbed the boy Bogarde and his friends as they were fishing in a Sussex river: they rejected her friendly advances and wondered, after she had gone, why there were so many witches in Sussex. This seems the opposite of name-dropping. Bogarde wants the lonely woman as an image, for poetic purposes, and her name is unimportant, tucked casually into this odd index…. Perhaps, though, he is being craftily throwaway...