Scene, the Santa Maria. Columbus is lighting a Hamlet cigar as he assures a member of the crew that the earth is round. The next minute, the camera pulls back and you can see the ship plunging off the edge of the world and into infinity. As this happens, Columbus is happily puffing on his cigar.

There is an equivalent tunnel vision to this book. Figures from history make an appearance, but only for their smoking habits. Thus Hitler hated smoking, Stalin between pipes smoked 80 cigarettes a day, and neither programme of mass murder was affected in the least. History is a mere index, the Crimean War significant because the returning soldiers introduced the cigarette to Europe; the Latin motto, In hoc signo vinces, ‘under this sign you triumph’, what the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine saw written in the sky before his victory, is mentioned only because it was borrowed for Pall Mall cigarettes.

Culture, too, is a backcloth. In 1913, Njinsky dances The Rite of Spring, and Camel cigarettes are launched. In 1939, John Wayne stars in Stagecoach, cup-sizing for bras is introduced, nuclear fission discovered, and Pall Mall cigarettes appear. Oh yes, and very much as an after thought, ‘World War II’. Watkins and Harrald have observed the world from the behind the bike shed, and the main impression you are left with is of their lunatic industry, and of their even more lunatic decision to write such a book at such a time.

So what is its effect? Does it proseletyse? Not really. There is mischief, yes. ‘John Gielgud had a mellifluous, modulated voice nurtured by a daily ration of Turkish cigarette smoke. The fool persisted in this destructive habit until his early death at the age of 96.’ And there is a sense of distance that will infuriate some, as in this curious fact, that on cigarette packets in the West there is the health warning ‘Smoking Kills’, while on those of Japan a polite ‘Be sure not to smoke too much’.

But one piece of folklore they do not attribute. The Tony Blair Suite, a description of one of those tents precariously assembled outside pubs, and the former Prime Minister’s one lasting legacy, was coined by Tom O’Shea, formerly landlord of the Old Red Lion in Litchborough. I was there the night it was put up and heard him say it.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP