In Cannes, in 1972, I asked Groucho Marx what he thought of Perelman. Too literary, he said, too allusive. If he wanted literature he preferred to go to old Tom Eliot. And then he was back on to the good days, with hookers at two bucks a throw. Perelman is allusive. He has a cat that has read Ulysses and goes 'Mkgrnao'...

Eastward Ha! is a new book that completes an inevitable diptych. (Diptych-shmiptych, I know I got oil.) Mr Perelman's tripnick journals make me uneasy because I don't know what to believe and what not. I mean, strange things happen in Bangkok anyway. And a Colombo passport control officer could have said: 'I've been stamping passports for years, but I'd just like to say that yours is one of the prettiest I've ever seen. It's done with real taste - not like some I could mention. May I ask who did it?' Get a humorist into exotic parts and he's not in real control, not like back home, where one can be fairly sure that Moss Hart would not really be ejected from Schrafft's for not consulting the management about the casting of My Fair Lady.