Sitting among the packed congregation at last month’s memorial service for A S Byatt, I became aware that about thirty-­five years of professional life was passing rapidly in front of my eyes. In fact, the entire spectacle could have served as the basis of a chapter in one of Anthony Powell’s novels, wanting only the late arrival of Widmerpool, ill-at-ease and accompanied by the Quiggin twins. For here, dressed in subfusc suits and sober gowns, were publishers who had sponsored my books and literary editors who had commissioned reviews from me. Here, too, were broadcasting eminences with whom I had chewed the fat on Front Row and other BBC arts programmes. And here, inevitably, were writers whose darling works I had roughed up and – the book world being what it is – who had roughed me up in turn.

Dignified and moving as the service was, full of sparkling tributes by those who had known and loved Byatt, it was difficult to keep humour at bay, if only because, as my eye roved around St James’s Piccadilly, it kept falling either on people who had said amusing things about her or on people about whom she had said amusing things. In the first category lay a literary editor who, sidling up to me at the launch party for Byatt’s 2002 novel A Whistling Woman, and having perhaps taken a glass of wine before­hand, had muttered the words ‘She’s a monster.’ In the second came the highly distinguished writer of whose achievements, when her name came up in conversation sometime in the 1990s, Antonia had observed in her posh Yorkshire accent, ‘She’s not in mai class.’

And all of a sudden came that Chestertonian twitch upon the thread of memory and I was back at the Byatt domicile in Putney in the spring of 1990, proof copy of Possession in hand, nervously interviewing her for The Independent. The London poll tax riot had taken place on