Armed (as it were) with little more than an eye for both a boxer and, more crucially, a boxing deal, Warren became an extremely wealthy Conservative-supporting adult and the owner of a Hertfordshire mansion. Frank Warren has spent forty years working with boxing's most colourful and controversial characters.

With cameo appearances from Frank Sinatra, Luciano Pavarotti, Pink Floyd and the Philadelphia mafia, Frank and Fearless is the unflinchingly candid and hard-hitting memoir of Britain's most famous and influential boxing promoter. The story of my life would be a bloody sight shorter if the man who tried to murder me outside the Broadway Theatre in Barking on a winter's evening in 1989 had succeeded. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The guy didn't say anything, but I could see that he was shaking like a leaf, obviously a bag of nerves. The Krays are dismissed as “paedophiles who preyed on young boys”, while “Champagne socialist” Mick Hucknall, ex-MP Tom Watson and “that prick” Kelvin MacKenzie may want to look away. The boxing promoter/manager/entrepreneur escaped death twice: in December 1988, he cancelled his seat on PanAm flight 103 which was blown up over Lockerbie. Unafraid to blow his own horn (“I’m the most successful manager of fighters this country has ever had, as well as the most successful promoter”), some of Warren’s claims are risible, such as the suggestion he’s never had “a sniff” of a fixed fight, or after detailing his charity work at exhausting length, “I don’t do things for the glory, which is just as well because I haven’t had any”.

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But there are digressions aplenty, such as a night out in London with Frank Sinatra (Warren promoted his dates at London Arena, the ill-fated venue he co-owned), where, still in his stage clothes, ol’ blue eyes became ol’ red eyes after drinking a whole bottle of Jack Daniel’s. At first I thought it was a car backfiring, but then I saw a man standing about 10 feet away from me, pointing a gun. However, Warren seems not to favour too many people and the score-settling escalates to industrial levels akin to Father Ted’s Golden Cleric acceptance speech.