Morgan: First and Last of the Real Sports Cars, by Brian Laban (Virgin, £25)

BY the year 2000, the eponymous Mr Honda's once reputed to have said, there would only be five car manufacturers in the world.

Then he added ...and Morgan.

Who cares whether he was wrong. He was also right. For most people who find themselves drawn into Brian Laban's work of love, the reward will be an absorbing read, a chronicle of one of Britain's enduring icons; a survivor because its fashion is not to be fashionable, which sells because it doesn't have to sell.

For others, like me, who drive past Morgan's unremarkable Pickersleigh Road factory from time to time, it's something more, a social history of a corner of Malvern Link from the late 19th Century, and of the family whose name has gone hand-in-glove with it for 95 years.

For most of its 316 pages, the story moves slowly from innovation to anachronism, but the looming cloud of Sir John Harvey-Jones' apparently devastating Troubleshooter programme is rarely far from the horizon.

When that episode comes - even though it recounts events now 10-years-old you're still as stunned as ever that he can have missed the Morgan point as he rolls out his big business ideas, that the very aspects of the operation he damns are the ones which have kept Morgan going all this time, from Runabout to Plus 8.

Stunned, until the chronicle hits the 21st Century, the era of the forthcoming Aero 8. Then his criticisms take on a new meaning.

You'll have to read it to find out why.

The company that's never built a car it hasn't sold, and never sold a car it hasn't built.

It's a remarkable story.

Mark Higgitt