Paul Skilleter is to Jaguar what Edward Gibbon was to Rome. Like Gibbon’s comprehensive vision of ancient empire Skilleter’s Jaguar history is profound, his award-winning books command premium prices. Accurate, comprehensive on models, aspects of design and development, Skilleter is prolific as writer and publisher.

Strictly Come Dancing. Strictly No Admittance! Strictly in the title is a good start for a definitive account of the dozen Lightweight E-type Jaguars built in the 1960s Competitions Department. Like Gibbon this is not light reading. At 2Kg you need a lectern. Peter Wilson spent hundreds of hours in the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust’s archives and his style reflects the memos Jaguar executives and engineers sent one another. Everybody was well-ordered, records were kept, no detail however arcane was overlooked. The result is gold dust for any Jaguar student, in particular anybody with a keen interest in any of those twelve, now almost priceless, originals.

Skilleter admits, having persuaded the author to follow up his book on the XJ13 with one on the Lightweights, scarcely realising what he had let himself in for. “The quantity of words, graphs, diagrams, and pictures presented was breath-taking.” The solution, characteristically, was to include everything. “At various times in my publishing career,” he writes in a Foreword, “I have considered it more important to provide the greatest amount of detail possible to the extent that some might not think it ‘commercial’.”

Peter Lindner - Peter Nocker Lighjtweight E-type.

Twenty-one appendices are a detailed list of every engine associated with the Lightweight, and a similar listing of all 12 along with several ‘sub-lightweights’ built around the same time. There are 900 illustrations of the 4½ years’ Wilson was in “Comps” behind the “No Admittance!” sign on the door.

The opening chapters have a fascinating explanation of E1A the prototype E-type created almost from the ashes of the 1956 factory fire. It is full of things you didn’t know, a great aide memoir to things you have forgotten, and sheds new light on the pieces of the car you thought lost forever.

ISBN 978-1-908658-21-0, Strictly No Admittance! The inside story of the ‘Lightweight’ E-type and the XK engine which powered it – the last works-built Jaguar to race at Le Mans by Peter D. Wilson, is a 416-page hardback with jacket, 31 x 23cm, custom shipping carton included at £95.00 (standard edition). An extra-special 12 numbered slip-cased copies have an engraved metal from 4868 WK at £975.

George III’s brother the Duke of Gloucester, presented with Volume 2 of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire exclaimed, “Another d-mn’d thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?” He already had Volume 1 and, like the Lightweight E-types there were ten more to come. As historian CV Wedgwood pointed out in her pamphlet on Edward Gibbon in 1955 “Empire (as advertised in The Bath Chronicle for ￡6.6s in 1790 and worth￡587 in 2012) is in a cool, limpid, crystal-clear prose that must have been at odds with almost everything that people read at the time.”

Makes Skilleter’s and Wilson’s work seem a bargain at £95. Let’s hope for no volumes on Decline or Fall.