James Taylor remembers very well the disappointment among his pretrol-head friends when the XJ-S was announced in 1975. It was not a replacement for the legendary E-type; its colours were uninspired; and its interior was drab. All credit, then, to those people at Jaguar who truly believed in the car and, over a period of nearly 20 years, turned the ugly duckling into a swan. From the moment the XJ-S HE arrived in 1981, there seemed to be renewed hope, and from then on, the car went from strength to strength to become the much-admirred grand tourer it always should have been. The book contains a timeline of the key events in the history of the XJ-S and an overview of the evolution of the XJS from the XJ27 prototype. There are Appendices covering identification/serial numbers, UK showroom prices through the years and sales in the US by year.