‘He was the true Willy Wonka of film-making – I feel like I won the golden ticket getting the chance to work with him!’ The speaker is Lara Flynn Boyle, who played Donna Hayward, the friend of the murdered Laura Palmer in David Lynch’s small-screen masterpiece Twin Peaks.

That comparison, cited in John Higgs’s terrifically lucid and compact study of the filmmaker, who died in January, aged 78, is rather brilliant. Plenty of actors might feel they’ve won a golden ticket in getting to work with some famous director, but none of those others get to be described as Willy Wonka: a genius with a dash of eccentricity, enclosed in the walled compound of his own reputation; an artist-craftsman dedicated to the continued manufacture of mysteriously delicious treats made to his own recipe and also just the littlest bit disturbing.

Higgs points out, incidentally, that not all actors considered working with Lynch a golden ticket. When Lynch screamed at him in a fit of rage during the filming of The Elephant Man (this was before the sustained practice of transcendental meditation calmed the director’s temper), Anthony Hopkins reportedly tried to get Lynch fired and had to be talked down by the producer, Mel Brooks. And for all that he was a one-off, Lynch certainly availed himself of the traditional Great Man prerogative of serial monogamy and many ex-wives. Higgs facetiously, or maybe quite seriously, says that ‘the love of Lynch’s life was Sparky, a terrier he owned in the 1980s’.

This bookis an unassumingly intuitive and insightful brief history, whose title succinctly implies that Lynch was under a spell as well as........

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