In early 2014, a set of beautifully produced studies of film stars was published by Phaidon. Co-produced with the venerable French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, these were loving and highly theorised dissections of the films of Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino.

Around the same time, a volume of a different kind skidded into print. It was not beautifully designed and bound; indeed, it had a hastily photocopied, almost samizdat feel to it. It was a film-by-film guide to the oeuvre of Danny Dyer.

According to the authors of The Films of Danny Dyer, the EastEnders actor is "the most bankable British film star we have in the independent sector", loved by men and women equally, a protégé of the "late, great" Harold Pinter.

The BBC genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are? recently unearthed the fact that Dyer is related to British royalty. But as this book makes clear, he's always been the king of British film.

What begins as a quixotic attempt to rehabilitate Dyer's reputation - tarnished by a succession of straight-to-DVD stinkers and an ill-fated spell as a lads' mag agony uncle - snowballs into a strangely delightful account of life at the rock bottom of the British film industry ("Filming began in Great Yarmouth..."; "Among the additions [to the cast] was the UK's fattest man, Barry Austin").