Wow, is Joan Collins the most glamorous woman alive or does someone else own that title? For what it’s worth, I think she is. The role of Alexis Carrington in Dynasty probably sealed the deal.

The World According to Joan is, as the title suggests, the author’s opinions on a number of topics, from glamour, to men, aging, children, values and manners. She is so famous that her surname does not appear on the cover of this book.

Joan Collins is an entertaining writer, although there isn’t anything particularly ground breaking in this book. The insights into being famous, beautiful and successful weren’t as surprising as I had expected. There was a lot of name dropping of famous people, but since they are probably the people she actually knows, this wasn’t all that surprising either. None of the stories about famous people were either so unknown or so scurrilous that they would make a gossip page in a magazine these days either.

The chapter on travel was interesting, as the author had been able to travel Concorde, which to my generation sounds like a glamorous and fast way to get from here to there. There is a romance to the name Concorde too, which I don’t feel when I hear the word ‘Dreamliner,’ although ‘private jet,’ (as mentioned by Joan Collins), has more of a ring to it.

Not surprisingly, Joan gives her readers good fashion, or rather style advice, in a series of dos and don’ts. For example, she suggests investing in Spandex to smooth the bumps, advises that polo necks for those with bigger busts in any other colour than black will make you look like a sausage and recommends white jeans for St Tropez or wearing on a yacht (I’ll bear that in mind next time I go within Cooee of either).

I did appreciate the author’s beauty advice though, which can be summed up as KEEP YOUR FACE OUT OF THE SUN. (I can not stress this enough, having had sun spots removed from my own nose after spending my teenage years trying to get my pink, freckled face to tan). Her other tip is to wear wigs. I don’t have any wigs, but it sounds like good advice. No more bad hair days.

The advice about men was good too. If you’ve made a mistake in the man (or men) you have married, cut your losses. Move on. Joan’s advice regarding messing around with married men should be heeded also. Don’t do it. And if you are stupid enough to make this mistake, since the married man Joan Collins was messing around with did not leave his wife for her, what makes you think your married man will leave his wife for you? And if he does, would you really want him anyway? (Okay, that last sentence was my opinion, not Joan’s, but I couldn’t resist).

Joan Collins shows her age in a number of ways in this book, not by being dated, but because of her common sense. I enjoyed The World According to Joan, but after watching an interview with her on television when she visited Australia a few years ago, think she appears even more interesting in person.