I’m also nearing the end of the first draft of the tenth book in my crime series The Pumpernickel Mysteries. What have I learned, at this great age, after spending some seventy years writing, publishing, and agenting, all of which I’m still practicing?

That experience is rarely reliable: I thought, when I started writing this latest story, that I knew what I was doing, but ended up jettisoning 47,000 words and starting again with a different plot and different characters.

That on a good day my characters can surprise me, and I can surprise myself, by finding the words that express what I want to say without too much fumbling; and when I look them over later, I’m not too ashamed of myself. Then there are bad days, but the sun eventually sets on them, and at my age I don’t get hangovers.

I’ve learned there isn’t a mysterious secret to coping with life that everyone but me seems to know: we all find our own way of bumbling on, and they all work, as long as they don’t damage others.

I’m aware that the routines we develop to keep us going should be a banister, not a prison: a bad start doesn’t mean the rest of the day is doomed. If I gear myself up to make an effort, and it’s reasonably productive, I’m not ashamed to enjoy a moment, even an hour or so, of idleness, otherwise known as taking a nap.

I know that our generation may have been lucky, but it’s no good bemoaning what’s happened since. Passing on despair to our children and grandchildren is totally unhelpful when what they need and deserve is hope.

To celebrate my birthday and the fact that our house, which we’ve lived in for well over half a century, has lasted 150 years, we gave a party. It was a happy mix of young and old, friends and family, people we’d known for years and those we’d befriended more recently. There were a few celebrities, whose attendance was flattering, but it was sobering to note that the younger guests had no idea who they were. I’m an optimist whose fantasy is that the mark I try to make with my writing and activism will one day be recognized and honoured. It’s a fantasy that consoles me when contemplating others’ achievements. I don’t begrudge them their success, but who doesn’t resent the attention given to works that are manifestly inferior to one’s own? Yet when books or films that were once hailed as masterpieces elicit no more recognition than a blank look and an apologetic shrug, why get all exercised about the judgement of posterity?

I currently wake up, mind blaring, around 4 am, do ten minutes of exercises to get brain and body working, then creep downstairs to have a glass of water, make decaff coffee, check out the news headlines to agitate the adrenalin, and then try to write a thousand words before taking the dog for a two-mile walk and tackling the day job. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m writing entertainment for thoughtful readers, rather than a manifesto that will change the world. I genuinely thought, especially during the 1960s and 70s, that I was contributing to a revolution, only to see some of the prejudices I believed we’d vanquished forever come roaring back, with different hairstyles. I despair of leaders who promise everything and deliver bugger all, but if anything that despair has pushed me leftwards rather than rightwards, even though I know - I’ve got a degree in the history of the English Civil War! - that revolution invariably leads to reaction.

In The Pumpernickel Mysteries I try to create credible villains who commit crimes that will make my readers boil with rage that might just spill out of the books and onto the streets. My trouble is I’m too genial, and lack the skills, persistence, and deviousness to create true villainy. My bad guys usually have something in their background that gives a psychological explanation for their behaviour, even if it doesn’t excuse it. But that may be because I’m part of a privileged, white, middle-class generation who have never fought in a war or experienced true hunger or deprivation, or even been in serious danger for expressing their beliefs. Or perhaps I’m not as good a writer as I’d like to think I am.

At my age I’m very aware of how suddenly something can happen - an accident, a disease, a catastrophe - that could rob me of the power to think, to write, to move around, to do all the things I currently take for granted. I am confident that my wife, whom I love and appreciate more and more the longer we are together, would see I was taken care of. I am less confident that, if she needed looking after, I would do what’s necessary effectively and with good grace. At my age I have developed many qualities, but patience, humility, and selflessness are not among them. I sometimes worry about this, but not as much as I worry about disillusion with politicians leading so many people to support fantasists and fascists bent on destroying so many of the things I believe in. Yet I don’t go on demonstrations the way I used to. I’m not as active. I tell myself I’ve been there and done that, it’s someone else’s turn, I’m doing my bit by signing online petitions and giving money to campaigning groups and above all by my writing.

I’m 85 and I still don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m still having fun doing it.

I remember, as a small boy, sitting opposite Clement Attlee in the Tube. He was all alone, wearing his trademark bowler hat, carrying his briefcase, and he sat quietly reading until he got off at Westminster. People nudged each other and whispered quietly, ‘That’s Attlee!’ but nobody approached, harangued, or interrupted him. This was the man who had been Churchill’s deputy throughout the war, who’d brought us the National Health service and the welfare state, nationalized the mines and the railways, decided we should possess the atom bomb, negotiated loans it took decades to pay off, and showed that socialism and democracy can live amicably together and produce offspring both boast of. The leader responsible for some of the biggest changes in British society since the Great Reform Bill of 1832 used public transport, without any kind of security, and the worst thing anyone in our compartment said was, ‘I bet he’s only travelling by Tube ‘cos his wife’s such a terrible driver!’

The next PM I met was Harold Macmillan, who wandered into the Lodge at Balliol while I was fiddling around with some post, and shook my hand and the porter’s. Neither of us, as it happened, was a Conservative, but forever after, when I bumped into the porter, he’d stick out his mitt and say, ‘Same ‘and, sir! Same ‘and!’ Macmillan was responsible for building more council housing than anyone before or since, and presided over a boom - ‘You’ve never had it so good!’ - despite, or because of, income tax around 90% and the fact that people at the top earned no more than twenty times what people at the bottom earned. He was forced to resign by trouble with his prostate - he was woken in his hospital bed by a man removing his secure telephone, and when he weakly asked if it couldn’t wait till he’d handed over the seals of office, he was told ‘'Fraid not, sir. Orders is orders.’ And of course he didn’t make a fuss.

When he retired from politics he chaired the family publishing firm of Macmillan, who’d commissioned me to write a biography of Lafayette (which they later turned down). I asked him if he’d write me a letter of introduction to the man who’d inherited Lafayette’s old home, a right-wing lawyer who was married to the daughter of Pierre Laval, the prime minister of Vichy France under the Nazis. I would never have got near such a man without the letter, which resulted in me being introduced as un copain de Macmillan. I took this as a compliment.

Harold Wilson I knew because his son and I went to the same school, our parents both being what was described as ‘Bollinger bolsheviks’. He turned up at speech days, and when he succeeded Hugh Gaitskell as Labour leader he floated the idea of an Open University, offering proper degrees in a wide variety of subjects with the teaching being done via television (this is before we all had computers) and some face-to-face tutorials. I was a young editor at Penguin at the time, having recently graduated with a Third that left me questioning the efficacy of the Oxbridge system, and the notion of a university open to everyone, of whatever age and from whatever background, was so exciting I persuaded my boss to let me write to Wilson offering Penguin’s support. He replied that it was just one of a number of ideas he’d put forward while promising ‘the white heat of the technological revolution’, but as soon as he became Prime Minister he created a Department of Culture and put Jennie Lee in charge of it, the widow of Aneurin Bevan who brought the NHS into being. She set up the Open University, and my tiny part in it was to get the ball rolling that saw Penguin publish many of its textbooks.

I have to admit I only met Edward Heath once. He had been replaced by Margaret Thatcher as Conservative leader, and he was one of two Balliol men who were standing to be Chancellor of Oxford University. The other one was Roy Jenkins, and as I was an MA (which anyone with a BA, even a lowly Third, could get by paying a fiver and being dobbed by the Chancellor in the Sheldonian Theatre), I turned up to vote. I regarded Heath’s policies as appallingly reactionary, and was glad when he was ousted by Thatcher, who I never thought would win or be taken seriously. (I thought exactly the same about Trump: what do I know?) But I did feel a bit sorry for Heath, as he skulked around the Buttery, the College bar, and nobody seemed to be talking to him, while Jenkins was surrounded by eager supporters, encouraged by the free drinks on offer. Maybe Heath wasn’t so organized or generous: he was a lonely man both privately and publicly, and this was another of his defeats, along with his bid to take Britain into Europe which was met with a Non from General de Gaulle.

I never actually met Tony Blair, but he worked as a junior barrister in the same chambers as my mother, as did his future wife Cherie, whom my mother always thought was much brighter than her husband. But I canvassed with enthusiasm for Labour around various Oxfordshire villages alongside Blair’s father-in-law, the actor Tony Booth, who was quite scathing off the record. When Blair won his great landslide victory I walked proudly round our village in a bright red shirt and thought democratic socialism had returned to our shores. Thatcher boasted that she’d buried it under her privatisation programme, but I hoped - we all hoped - Blair would restore the welfare state, even though his New Labour had erased Clause 4. Instead he invited Thatcher to tea, and said things like, ‘When people accept Peter Mandelson, I’ll know that New Labour has succeeded.’ That ended well, didn’t it?

I met David Cameron several times: he was our local MP, and was often seen shopping in our local supermarkets, with a couple of security men at a discreet distance. Also, the best man at his wedding was a neighbour of ours who invited us to their parties, which Cameron attended. I was quite proud of the fact that when, during an election, Cameron came through the village, he would have to pass large signs saying Vote Labour at all three entrance roads.

Of course when I met him I was far too polite to comment on the fatal mistake he made in calling a referendum on Brexit and then not doing enough to squash the arguments of the Leavers. Despite raging at what politicians say on tv, nice people like me don’t attack opponents at parties. We tell ourselves that decent politicians - the ones who believe in civilized debate and who have a sense of history as well as humour - deserve a drink and a break, like the rest of us, and we talk about the weather and laugh at their jokes. If we raised a serious topic, would it make any difference? Would they go away and rethink their policies as a result of our intervention? We may be complicit and cowardly, but we also know how to behave, do we not?

I almost forgot the time I met Boris Johnson, though his father Stanley and I were contemporaries at Oxford and were both living in the same part of Manhattan’s SoHo when Boris was born. As a grown-up, if such a term can be properly applied to him, Boris often appeared on tv shows like Have I Got News for You, and took the same approach as he did to politics - pretending ignorance, ruffling his hair, cracking jokes that made you think he didn’t want you to take him seriously, he just wanted to be liked (and paid, if possible). We met him on our way out of a party given by my cousin Barbara, who was, and still is, married to Conrad Black (not all my family are progressives). Boris arrived late, as usual, and we congratulated him on his latest tv performance. ‘It was a stitch-up!’ he said, barrelling his way forwards with a big grin - the excuse he always made when things went wrong. Along with many others, I took him for a buffoon like Trump, only better educated. My political antennae have been badly bruised by my misjudgment of the damage both men have caused.

I encountered Keir Starmer twice. The first was when he was shadow Minister for Brexit, and he came to talk to our constituency about Labour’s policy on the forthcoming referendum. He was far keener on staying in Europe than the party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and he made his points in a witty, well-informed speech that convinced me Remain would win. I had originally opposed the idea of joining Europe when Heath, and his rival for Oxford Chancellor, Roy Jenkins, argued in favour - my slogan was ‘small is beautiful’. I changed my mind over the years, and when Leave won I was miserable. But I was persuaded by the policies Starmer put forward when he stood for the leadership vacated by Corbyn. I honestly did not think for one moment that a decent, honourable, serious and statesmanlike politician would say things merely to get elected, and then blithely jettison them without consulting or explaining his reasons to the people who’d elected him. That, to me, is the reason he became so disliked that eventually the parliamentary party dumped him, as unceremoniously as he had dumped his promises and told those who disagreed with him ‘they knew where the door was’.

We elect people to do a job we want someone else to do, because it’s a difficult and thankless role that requires a dedication and determination most of us lack. We all want to be liked, and politicians have somehow to deal with people who dislike them intensely. But we vote for politicians whose views we respect, and trust them to do what they promise or tell us the reason why. How else are we to judge them? Trust is the basis of all human relationships, personal, professional, and political. How can you respect someone when you can’t believe a word they say? You can’t, even when you want to go on believing them.

All of which I wanted to say to Starmer when I met him at an event just before he was elected Prime Minister. I’ve written about this before: I was all primed to chide him about his lack of accountability when he gave me a hug as I was sitting next to my friend who owned the farm where he was speaking, and my opportunity was smothered. That’s why I’m not sorry he’s gone. When someone you sort of like makes you a promise and then lets you down, not once but repeatedly, you don’t mourn his comeuppance. You think, serve him right, even if you get a bit snuffly when you see him looking tearful.

I met Andy Burnham when he was standing for leader against Starmer. He was affable, witty, likeable - and he was the only politician I spoke to who thought the idea of holding politicians accountable between elections was a good one. I followed this up with his office, and they were encouraging, but I wasn’t sure how serious he was, and I ended up voting for Starmer. Serve me right, OK, but how come I still hope that Burnham will offer promises that will make a difference, and actually carry them out? How, after all my experience with Prime Ministers who, apart from Attlee, ended up broken, can I still be an optimist?

Maybe it’s something in the genes, but more likely it’s the simple belief that you’ve got to give a decent person a decent chance. If they let you down, you either decide to do the job yourself, which for most of us is unthinkable, or wait for someone else to come along. It’s been a long wait, but at my age I take the genial view that progressive ideas gradually move from being attacked to being adopted. They’re greeted with ‘Never in a million years!’ by people who end by saying ‘why hasn’t this been done before?’ Isn’t that what we call progress?

We’re amazed that he gets away with it. We watch, wide-eyed, giggling with disbelief as he behaves ever more outrageously, acting in a manner that any responsible adult would have slapped down long ago. We tell ourselves that wouldn’t happen here, that we live in democracies that have built-in mechanisms to prevent such egregious abuse of power, that there must be something grievously wrong with America if they can elect a dangerous buffoon and are then unable to stop him running amuck.

But we’re in no position to pontificate. We did it too. People on the other side of the Channel from us don’t understand how we could have voted to leave the European Union, and lump us all together, as we lump Americans together, as fools who destroyed our own future. It’s no good me saying, ‘but I voted to remain,’ any more than an American is absolved for saying ‘I voted for Kamala Harris’. Our winner-takes-all electoral system, and our lack of a method of holding politicians accountable in between elections, means that we’re all stained with the same mud of disapproval. Even proportional representation doesn’t resolve all problems: the Israelis use it, and look what they’ve landed themselves with, time after time!

As Churchill said, democracy’s the worst of all possible systems, until you’ve tried the others. It means that even if you’ve voted against your government, and are vehemently opposed to what it’s doing, you are held responsible for its actions. It explains why some of those who hate what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians extend their hatred to Jews in general. Even when they say, ‘Some of my best friends are Jewish…’ It’s lazy thinking, of course it is. But few of us are capable of positive, let alone radical thinking, when our brains have been battered into numbness by what’s happening to our world.

I take refuge in recalling some of the friends and acquaintances I made in America, many of whom helped to define their era, the 1960s, even though most of them are forgotten or dead. It was a time when people still listened to each other - especially if you were a regular at Elaine’s Restaurant on Manhattan’s Second Avenue and 88th St.

Elaine was a large woman with big glasses and a manner that was combative to those who misbehaved and tender towards her favourites, of whom I was one. I’m not sure why - maybe the British accent, the innocent manner, the enthusiasm of youth (I was 23), the fact that I was a senior editor at America’s leading paperback publisher, who wanted to be a writer despite not knowing what he wanted to write, and wasn’t put off by editing the writings of others. Plus my ability to bullshit with the best who, at Elaine’s, varied from Woody Allen to Tennessee Williams.

The food was terrible, the drink was endless, and there was a ‘family table’ where I would get drunk with the poet Frederick Seidel, who despite being married to the glamorous Phyllis was passionately in love with an English beauty who happened to share the flat of the woman with whom I lost my virginity, in London’s Chelsea. Fred, who casually introduced me to Leonard Bernstein in Grand Central Station, raved endlessly about Alexa’s looks - she was tall, which neither I nor Fred were, with very fine dark hair (Phyllis was blonde) and long elegant limbs like a racing foal - and he wrote her letters and sent her telegrams to which she rarely replied (she later married a marquis, though it didn’t last).

I don’t know how Fred survived financially: he was a kind of hip Scott Fitzgerald, fastidious with words, sloppy with relationships, hopeless at commitment, brittle yet full of bravado. His brother-in-law Frank Conroy was of Irish-American working-class stock - what Phyllis’s upper-crust parents thought about both their daughters marrying penniless writers is not recorded - and on the night he got a publishing contract (not from me) for his first novel, he came into Elaine’s with his entire advance, a thousand dollars wrapped in a rubber band, which he repeatedly dunked into his glass of beer. Or it may have been champagne. I think that was the night when we all ended up drinking with Norman Mailer in his apartment with a wonderful view of Brooklyn Heights. Norman had a reputation for pugnacity - he had shot one of his wives in a drunken dare - but he was all sweetness and generosity on that occasion. Which is how I remember most of my American friends.

This may be the amber glow of whisky-fuelled memories. What I recall most fondly from my nights at Elaine’s was that we, at the ‘family table’ at any rate, competed all the time to show how clever and witty and creative we were, without trying to impress each other. We gave more weight to words than actions. We were all talk. If you didn’t contribute to the conversation, you were expelled from the table. The tongue was our most active organ. Followed by the ear. We talked, but we also listened. Conversation was an endless dialogue.

Now it’s a monologue. How did we let that happen?

Peter Buckman's crime series The Pumpernickel Mysteries is now available.

It was October 1962, and I was a couple of months into my first job, at Penguin Books in Harmondsworth, which is just across the road (OK, a few roads) from London’s Heathrow airport.

I worked in the copy-editing department, in a large open-plan office where a bunch of us corrected manuscripts and proofs with devotion and diligence, knowing that other departments regarded our work as both menial and cushy, though if readers or reviewers complained about factual or grammatical errors in the text, let alone typos, we were held responsible. We had the sort of camaraderie wartime stretcher-bearers enjoyed: we weren’t front-line warriors, but we ferried the wounded back to safety.

When the Russians under Khrushchev sent a flotilla of ships apparently bearing nuclear missiles sailing towards Cuba, President John F Kennedy vowed to stop them crossing into what America regarded as its waters. He had at first backed regime change, using Cuban ex-pats trained by the CIA to sabotage the country’s facilities and prepare the ground for an invasion that would topple the Communist government led by Fidel Castro. That had ended in the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs, which had emboldened the Russians to start building missile sites in Cuba, ninety miles from the United States. These were described as ‘purely defensive’, and were intended to counter the American launch sites that had recently been extended to Italy and Turkey. Kennedy’s blockade to stop the Russian fleet might have been a lesser threat than invasion, and it avoided a declaration of war, which would have needed Congressional approval, but he backed his threats by ordering US bombers to be in a constant state of readiness. Those planes were loaded with nuclear weapons.

The progress of this impending confrontation was continuously reported and there was no way you could escape it. I was the youngest and newest copy-editor at Penguin: I was being paid £650 a year, rising to £700 after three months, and £750 when I was fully trained, which they reckoned would take nine months. If I lived that long. Because everyone, even the oldest amongst us, believed it was entirely possible we would be obliterated if the Russians breached the American blockade. Both sides had the Bomb. If one of them used it, so would the other.

We’d all seen the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Memories of the war were still fresh - the Korean War as well as World War Two. One or two of us had joined the thousands who marched from Aldermaston, the centre of Britain’s atomic weapons programme, to Trafalgar Square, under the banner of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I’d always meant to march the whole way, but ended up joining when the procession got to Park Lane. It was still like getting into a warm bath full of like-minded people, but without the blistered feet. I probably joked about this to my office colleagues. I had vowed that on my first day I would be a serious, grown-up person and not clown around just to make everyone like me. That vow lasted less than five minutes.

Clowning aside, all of us were serious about the threat of annihilation we were facing. We talked about where you could go to escape radioactive contamination. New Zealand was a popular choice, but it was a very long and expensive flight, and you couldn’t turn up and expect to be let in without a visa. What could a 21-year-old with an Oxford Third in History offer a country with more sheep than people? Ireland was nearer, and less like the Home Counties as imagined by Enid Blyton. Apparently its pattern of winds meant the fallout would miss it, though why the clouds that brought regular rainfall wouldn’t also be full of nuclear dust wasn’t made clear.

We talked, in the office, of bringing our passports in and catching whatever flight would take us away from Britain, a prime target, both as America’s staunchest ally and also home to many of its aircraft that would be used to bomb Russia, if their fleet crossed the line.

I was still living with my parents. Would I have abandoned them to fly to safety? Gone somewhere I knew nobody, with no savings except for a few pounds left over from my allowance, and no useful qualifications? Would I, who could hardly bear being alone for more than a few minutes, have left my friends and family out of a blind and selfish instinct for survival?

All I can say is I seriously thought about it. It wasn’t like that selfish desire to kill yourself when you’re in your teens and no one understands you or has ever suffered the way you’re suffering. You want to kill yourself then because you’re unbearably miserable, of course, but also to punish those who so signally failed to understand and encourage you. You want them to suffer for not easing your pain.

Escaping a nuclear holocaust is more primal than that. It’s the panic you see in animals trying to escape a forest fire: their first care is for themselves. They’ll trample on anything that gets in their way, and only when they’ve reached safety will they pause to think about the rest of the herd.

Plus, I was still a virgin. How could I be turned to dust before I’d had sex? In someone with a bit more courage, that might have been an excuse to accost some stranger and get them to indulge me, educate me, enjoy me before we were both exploded. But I didn’t. The women in the office all had partners, including the office secretary, who took pity on me when I had to dictate my first letter to an author, but didn’t extend her sympathy to easing my virginal plight. Maybe she might have been more generous if I hadn’t remarked on the article I noticed she’d been reading, on how to increase the size of your breasts by splashing them with diluted bicarbonate of soda. I’ve never known when to keep my mouth shut.

The night when Kennedy broadcast to the world that nuclear armed bombers were ready to stop the Russians from crossing his red line, I’d been out with an old schoolfriend I hadn’t seen for a while. We’d had dinner with his family, and I remember being struck by the fact that his parents kissed each other in front of us. We hadn’t talked about the missile crisis, but had its inescapable presence loosened all the bounds of civilized behaviour? This was before the Sixties had begun to swing, and public displays of emotion, let alone affection, were treated as if you’d burped on a crowded bus.

When I got home to my parents’ house, my mother was still up. My father was abroad on business, my brother and sister were still schoolchildren and asleep, my mother, who rarely showed emotion, was worried enough to need someone approximately grown-up to talk to. When the parent you’d automatically go to with your worries needs you around for reassurance, things must be truly serious.

We listened to the Kennedy broadcast together. It was a sombre speech that must have reminded my mother of Neville Chamberlain’s announcement in 1939 that, after promising ‘peace in our time’, we were now at war with Germany. I was born when that war was two years old. In the nuclear age, the fighting wouldn’t last that long. We’d all be blown up in seconds. There’d be no escaping it.

My mother hugged me tightly in case it was for the last time. I went to bed thinking of all the things I’d miss. I thought I’d never get to sleep. What was the point if I was going to die as a twenty-one year-old virgin? I didn’t even bother making a list of things I was going to do if I was spared. This wasn’t a life-changing event, after which I’d resolve to be a better person. It was a life-extinguishing situation. There was nothing to look forward to, except nothingness.

We all woke up, of course. The Russian ships turned back. America and Russia did deals, including setting up a hotline. My father, phoning from China to check on us, said he knew it would never come to war. My mother and I told him that, to us, it had felt pretty damn close.

I have never forgotten the bubble of dread which encased us while we watched, helpless, as events unfolded. What I don’t understand is why no one seems to feel that dread now, today, in April 2026, in the bubble that Trump and Netanyahu have created around us. I cannot imagine the feelings of those being bombed in the Middle East, but why aren’t the rest of us, who aren’t directly victims but who will have to live with the consequences of this craziness - why aren’t we more afraid? Is it because no one, apart from those who voted for him, can take Trump seriously? But he is doing serious damage, to the world, to his own country, to what used to be known as civilized values, to belief in the law, to the trust we put in the people we vote for to at least keep us safe.

How can anyone take seriously a man so vain, so ignorant, so rude, so crude, so irresponsible, so inconsistent, so lacking in basic humanity? Yet how can anyone stop him before he does even more damage that will take generations to recover from? That’s the dread I have: not, as I felt in 1962, that we’ll all be obliterated, but that we seem to be lacking that innocent child who would point to Trump and say ‘but the emperor has no clothes!’

I hope I live long enough to see him and Netanyahu brought to trial in front of an international court and convicted of war crimes. I hope I see all those people who’ve sucked up to him for so long being punished and shunned. Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias should be a lesson to bullies like Trump and Netanyahu who boast they will make their enemies despair. But who reads poetry these days?

I met Harald when I was in my second year at Balliol and he signed up to try rowing, the only sport I was any good at. He was already a champion yachtsman, but had never sat in a narrow wooden boat that kept you just above the water line, provided you didn’t capsize the thing by failing to pull on your oar in exactly the same rhythm as the other rowers.

Though of course I knew who he was - Crown Princes weren’t that common in an egalitarian college like Balliol - I asked for his name and he said, simply, ‘Harald’. I took him down to the river with a bunch of other freshmen and attempted to teach him the basics. Unlike me, he was a natural athlete, and was soon being coached by people who knew more than I did, and rowing in crews that were more successful than mine.

We remained friendly, though - we attended the same boat club dinners and got drunk enough to stagger out into the quad, urinate on a tree supposedly planted by Princess Margaret, and sing an obscure song called the Gordouli, whose words made little sense and consisted largely of mild insults aimed at our neighbouring college Trinity. Harald never got silly drunk the way I did, but then he was four years older and had a lot more experience. He apparently had a secret girlfriend, though I never met her: she knitted him a pullover to keep him warm in the freezing Oxford winters, and his crew members admired it so much she was persuaded to knit several more. She was a commoner, and they were later married despite his father’s objections - Harald said if he couldn’t marry her, he wouldn’t marry at all, which worked out better for him than for our Edward VIII: she’s still Norway’s Queen.

Though this was the start of the Sixties, colleges were still single-sex (and the windows single-glazed), the gates were closed at ten p.m., by which time visitors were supposed to be out, and if you missed the curfew, you had to climb up a drainpipe and persuade a student with an accessible window to open it and let you in. Harald had rooms in the front quad over looking Broad Street and he generously kept his bedroom window unlatched for latecomers. Perhaps he slept in his pullover, as the bedrooms were unheated. He had to walk several yards to find a lavatory and there were fewer than a dozen bathrooms for four hundred students - all very character-building. We wore shirts with collars and ties and tweed jackets in winter and blazers in summer, with cavalry twill trousers or corduroys and brogues. I was still a virgin, and by far from the only one.

Harald would drop by my room for drinks, and I persuaded him to host a ‘GO’ party. A couple of friends and I came up with the ridiculous idea of a gathering where you drank Guinness and ate pickled onions (hence ‘GO’) with arrowroot biscuits, to try and persuade a gossip columnist who always drank in the bar of the Randolph Hotel that this was the latest fashionable craze. The patronage of people like Harald assured it got national coverage, and we all got invited to the Guinness brewery in Park Royal where they substituted oysters for the pickled onions.

In the summer vacation Harald accepted my invitation to lunch at my parents’ house in Hampstead, which was memorable for two things: my dad asked him what he was going to do after he left Oxford, and he said ‘Go into my father’s business’. (One thing a successful royal needs is a sense of humor.) The other thing was my mother got out her best table linen, and the napkins were so fine Harald mistook his for his handkerchief and blew his nose on it. Nobody said anything as he stuffed it into his pocket, and we assumed he’d have it laundered and returned. Which never happened. My dad, from whom I have inherited my lack of deference, thereafter referred to him as ‘that thief who ruined the set’.

Some years later, when I gave some talks on scriptwriting in Oslo, Rosie and I were invited to the Royal Palace for an audience with my old mate the King. We were coached by his equerry to bow when we went in and again when we left. Harald’s first words were, ‘Long time no see.’ We chatted very easily about old times until a red light flashed on his desk and our time was up. He said we must come and have dinner with him when we were next in town. Somehow I never got around to asking him what happened to that napkin. I’m still a republican, but there are some things you don’t do in the presence of royalty. Unless you break the rules - and we all know what trouble that causes.

We were filming in and around Dublin, at Ardmore Studios. I’d just been diagnosed with stage three colonic cancer, and was due to have an operation when I got back. It didn’t occur to me that I wouldn’t survive and go on to write more scripts for more Oscar-winning directors, but then you know what an optimist I am. And at least one of my assumptions proved correct.

The script was being financed by Hallmark, and John was persuaded to direct it as he had nothing else on. The producer and I met him at his flat in a mansion block on the Gloucester Road that smelt of curry. He used his Oscar and BAFTA Awards as bookends. He had an endearing chuckle, and when he praised my script and talked about casting - Ben Kingsley! Joanna Lumley! - my devotion to him and his work increased in intensity. Even when he made a few casual suggestions that would mean an intensive rewrite, my admiration was undimmed. Especially when I was assured by the producer that there was money for a new draft (which he then claimed half of, but that’s another story.)

When the rewritten script was greenlit, the producer and I celebrated at The Ivy, the English equivalent of Broadway’s Sardi’s, where I managed to get us a table because I’d once admired a cap worn by the maitre d’, and he’d responded by giving me his personal number. He squeezed us in and we tried to pretend we were celebs too. No one took any notice of us, but celebs have to surround themselves in a reflective bubble, don’t they, so they’re seen without seeing? As with the operation I was to undergo in a few weeks’ time, I persuaded myself that the success I always knew was inevitable had finally arrived.

When filming started, John summoned me to Ireland to be on hand for rewrites. I’d been present at the filming of my scripts before, but going abroad, being put up in an hotel - John had a house rented for him, the stars stayed somewhere in the centre of Dublin, I was on the outskirts with the junior members of the cast - and having my daily expenses paid, was a new experience. I felt the same family closeness as you get in the theatre: I was part of a small fighting force bound closely together to conquer the world, once we had defeated the evil forces of management who wanted to limit our costs and ambitions.

I was only meant to be there for a few days but I tried to extend it as long as I could, to avoid thinking about my impending op. At the end of each day’s shooting I would go to John’s rented house and talk through what was and wasn’t working, and I would then return to my room and do rewrites, which the next day were typed up by the production office on sheets with a different colour for each version.

It was rare that I got time to socialize with the actors, but I plucked up the courage to invite Joanna Lumley to dinner, pleading that as we were both vegetarians, we could continue what the film Babe had started and convert the world to eating less meat. Sweeney Todd in my version was a barber who had been shipwrecked and forced to eat dead human flesh to survive, which gave him the taste for the pies his ally Mrs Lovett made out of the clients whose throats he cut. Joanna played Mrs Lovett, and incidentally proved the old cliché about celebs being able to get a table when there was no room for ordinary folk. As I was the host, I was desperately trying, without success, to book somewhere that was halfway decent or at least provided good vegetarian options. I put the problem to the head porter at her hotel, and he solved it with one phone call, using her name. She sat with her back to the room, though her instantly recognizable face was reflected in the mirrored walls, and she was gracious to everyone who approached her. I can’t remember anything we talked about, except that when I excused myself to have a pee and pay the bill, she had somehow already dealt with it.

Which was a very different experience from the Indian meal on my last night, arranged by the junior members of the cast, and joined at the last moment by an actor who shall be nameless, and was very gracious and encouraging to everyone, and ordered an expensive bottle of claret though most of us drank beer. We agreed to divide the bill equally, assuming the wine would be paid for separately. It wasn’t. Not all celebs are naturally generous.

The reason John fell asleep while a couple of scenes were being set up was, apparently, because he ignored his doctors’ advice to pace himself and eat sensibly. I don’t know if the assistant sharing his house was a sensible cook, but I do know that there were many demands on his attention. He had to decide on the shooting schedule, while grumbling that the budget was far too low, and the producers far too mean, to allow him to get the effects he wanted. Apart from coaxing the performances he envisaged through take after take, he had to deal with actors who took a couple of days off to explore the country. And while giving me invaluable advice on the script - ‘layer it like a sandwich, dear, with a bit of something either side that leaves you wanting more’ - he was also trying to watch the nominations for Best Film for an awards jury he was on.

Once filming was over, he sent me a bottle of champagne to help me recover from my operation (which was a complete success), and invited me to sit between him and the composer Richard Rodney Bennett while they decided where the music should go. My high hopes for the film were shaken by the dispiriting experience of attending a screening for distributors in London’s Leicester Square. I sat with the producer while all around us the auditorium emptied as people left, some after only a few minutes. The producer explained that this was perfectly normal, there were many screenings going on at the same time, it wasn’t a criticism of the film. But I thought it was, and John was disappointed in it too. The last time I spoke to him, he told me his friends thought there weren’t enough jokes. Which was, of course, the fault of my script.

I went to his funeral - Joanna was there too - and it was held at a synagogue so liberal, the men didn’t even cover their heads. Now I’m a Jewish atheist, as I’m sure John was, but somehow this seemed, I don’t know, disrespectful. I’d brought a yarmulka with me - every Jewish boy has a yarmulka, right? - and just before the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, I surreptitiously fished it out and perched it on the back of my head. I felt a bit silly, then defiant. Here was I, a radical who always yearned to be taken for a revolutionary, as long as I didn’t have to go to jail or anything, surrounded by a congregation who, like me, were mostly unbelievers, and my revolutionary gesture is to stick a symbol of orthodoxy over my bald patch. That would certainly have made John chuckle.

I don’t ask people to pay to read my Substack, because then I’d feel bound to try and post something every week, and worry about running out of things to say. But I’d love followers and friends to take a look at my crime series The Pumpernickel Mysteries, which are available from Amazon, Ingram, and all good bookshops.

Bernard Stone was a small spare man with little glasses on a beaming clean-shaven balding head that was full of generosity and curiosity. I’ve no idea how he made any money, as he dispensed wine to everyone he liked - he was naturally very popular - and I rarely saw anyone buying the books in his shop; some new, some second-hand, some quite rare and signed by authors whose names everyone knew at the time, even - especially - if they hadn’t read their work.

I’ve never understood why signed editions are supposedly more valuable than unsigned ones. Having seen the queues at literary festivals at the tables of bestselling writers with their pens on the go, I guess it’s because a signature is a personal link with celebrity. What that adds to the financial value is still a mystery.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Russian whose best-known poem is perhaps Babi Yar, signed a book for me which I actually paid for. He didn’t give a reading or anything: the pleasure of those bookshop afternoons was of relaxing with like-minded people who were as ordinary as we were, with celebs acting ordinary because they weren’t on show. Yevtushenko had been censored, attacked, and threatened with jail in Russia - all things we protesters half-longed to suffer, because it would have shown we were being taken seriously, if not actually having an effect.

On demos I carried a little booklet outlining my legal rights, and containing the numbers of solicitors who would get me out of jail if I was arrested - a fate I managed to avoid despite my preparedness. The nearest I came was at a Committee of 100 demo in Trafalgar Square addressed by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. It went on for so long I had to go for a pee in the nearby Tube station, and the moment I left the police moved in, arresting Russell among many others. I felt a bit guilty at not being a martyr, but I’ve managed to live with it.

The biggest thrill about drinking with Yevtushenko was that he stood up for all the things that mattered, but also knew how to survive when the choice was between compromise and martyrdom. Survivors are better company than martyrs. I wish I could find the book he signed for me, though I’m sure it will turn up.

I have found a book signed for me by Allen Ginsberg, the author of Howl, who I’d last seen in Chicago, surrounded by Yippee protesters who he led in chanting ‘Om’ when faced by the rifle-toting National Guard. We were in Bernard’s bookshop showing off our baby daughter when Ginsberg dropped in: he signed a copy of The Fall of America, getting my surname wrong but scribbling ‘an Ah for the Babe’, with an ‘Om’ for good measure, which more than made up for it. The final time we met he gave a joint poetry reading with his father, which made me think this revolutionary and ‘beat poet’ was still a nice Jewish boy at heart: the obvious affection they had for one another, despite their very different styles, was very endearing.

Through a meeting at the bookshop we also became good friends with the Liverpool poet and artist Adrian Henri, a large, bearded, teddy bear of a man with thick black glasses and sparse, straggly hair that started halfway down his scalp and ended up on his shoulders. He had bought a packet of disposable ladies’ knickers and he wanted to print a poem on them, using an old hand press on which Bernard produced limited editions of poetry. I remember hours of experimenting involving a lot of ink and a lot of wine until the type and the knickers came together in a limited edition I’ve still got somewhere. I can’t remember the poem, though.

I don’t read much poetry, to be honest, even the stuff by poets I knew. I’m a prose man at heart, though I have written a poem to be read at my funeral. I recognize poetry’s power to distil an emotion in an image, but I remember and revere the poets of my acquaintance more for their lifestyle than their work. What made me want to be a writer was as much the routine-ignoring, pleasure-indulging, bawdy, boozy image of your typical poet as the power to tell stories that would affect hearts and change minds.

Most of the poets I met lived up to the image, unlike Henry Miller, who wrote Tropic of Cancer, a book that contains descriptions of sex pubertal boys would read under the bedclothes with a torch and a tissue handy. We met him at the Boyars’ house - Marion was an avant-garde publisher with John Calder, her husband Arthur was a poet (and a translator of Yevtushenko, as it happens). At one of their parties we came across Henry Miller sitting quietly on a sofa, alone, in a suit, bespectacled, liver-spotted, and a legend. We had a conversation, but I just remember one thing he said. It was, ‘You’re the best-looking couple I’ve seen.’ It is only as I type this that I realize his compliment could have been a chat-up line he’d used for decades. Would Henry Miller lie, a writer who made Lady Chatterley’s Lover look prim? You believe what you want to believe: that’s the power of stories.

Jerry Rubin, who once stayed in my London flat, was a founder of the Yippies and one of the Chicago Seven, but turned into a Yuppie capitalist. How the hell did things like that happen?

I swore I’d never become one of those lefties who drifted to the right and fulminated in old age against everything I’d supported in my youth, and that’s one oath I’ve been true to. Indeed, faced with a political culture that has been moving rightwards ever since we failed to bring about the revolution we were confident (even when we weren’t stoned) was just around the corner, I’ve supported the tenets of democratic socialism more strongly than ever. And with the same lack of success.

The 1960s now seems as remote as the Renaissance, though its art hasn’t lasted as well. I started 1968 reporting on the student riots in Paris for the Sunday Times, though they never printed my piece as when they realized how serious it was, they called in the professionals. I met and interviewed Danny Cohn-Bendit, who invented the slogan ‘Begin by breaking things’ that later haunted Silicon Valley; I marched with the students to the huge car factory in the suburbs of Paris whose workers came out on strike in support - it was assumed - of the students. I have never forgotten interviewing some of the workers and asking how they felt about the students’ demands, which had already resulted in the occupation of the Sorbonne and other sacred institutions that seriously rattled the government. The car workers I talked to shrugged. ‘We’re on strike pour les sous - for money,’ they said. My idealism was dented, but not destroyed.

To research the first book I was commissioned to write, The Limits of Protest, I travelled across America, and everywhere I landed was declared a disaster area, which was exciting but not entirely my fault. I would call myself a radical, but I’ve always been more reactive than proactive, a follower rather than a pioneer, and my socialism was enriched or diluted, depending on your point of view, by my friendship with people like Richard Neville, who was best man at my wedding and the founder of Oz, the hippest magazine of the late 1960s. Richard spent a week in jail when one issue, edited by schoolchildren, was declared obscene, though the verdict was swiftly overturned on appeal. Oz explored the counter-culture that promised a revolution in our personal lives would lead to a political revolution which would destroy an oppressive and repressive system and replace it with one that emphasized love and freedom.

Richard was a hippie till the end, and always regarded me as rather square, but I find it hard to understand how the guys I faced the Illinois National Guard with, when they advanced on us in 1968 Chicago with jeeps fronted with razor wire, and where I was also chased down a pedestrian subway by a cop on a motorcycle - how could these guys, like Eldridge and Jerry, end up joining the very people who had attempted to arrest, beat, torture, jail, and even kill them?

Was it because we promised so much and delivered so little? That the sex and drugs that were supposed to herald a new beginning didn’t abolish a single slum, save a single citizen from countries ruled by despots, or end a single war? (Despite the millions who marched and demonstrated to end the war in Vietnam, it was the military triumph of the Viet Cong that brought about US withdrawal.)

There are those who blame the current wave of popularism and nationalism on the hippie generation of which I was a part. I am more concerned about how so many of us ended up on the other side. I don’t think it was just growing up. I think it was their - our - constant search for acceptance and approval.

We evolve by adapting. We all want to find a herd, or hive, where we will be welcomed and respected. The new herd may take us backwards and sideways as well as forwards, but we remain members for as long as they accept and approve of us. Eldridge and Jerry moved through several herds in their quest for acceptance. Richard and I were lucky enough to find acceptance among those we’d been grazing with since our youth. When all political promises involve a goal that is just over the next hill, we live in hope - but we are nourished by approval. That’s evolution for you.

Paul and I are around the same age, though I didn’t look anything like him, either then (this was 1963) or now: my hair was curly, but I was wearing a suit from the King’s Road and a tie, like the Beatles did in their early days, and I suppose the sight of a young man getting out of a cab in fashionable gear was what made them scream and crowd around me, especially when I pressed the button for Dr Asher’s flat.

It was alarming, annoying, and exhilarating all at once. No one, and certainly not a girl, had ever grabbed at my clothing, so that was a new experience. They quickly realized I wasn’t the man whose name they were screaming, and lost interest, and to turn so quickly from an object of desire to one of disappointment was disheartening: did I have no appeal of my own?

It made me wonder what the fans expected to get from a brief encounter with their idol, and how the idols themselves remained so good-humored, so patient, and so level-headed when they were being pecked and clawed like crows on a carcass. Maybe that’s why they took refuge in drugs and booze, to muffle the ridiculousness of it all. I was a middle-class white boy in his early twenties who would never shriek in public and didn’t even like joining in the crowd chants at the demos I went on regularly. I was an uptight male who tried not to let his feelings show, and I affected to despise people who sobbed and shouted and shoved others aside to get near enough to touch someone whose talent was writing and singing songs, an activity as mysterious to me as podiatry.

A few years before there had been riots in cinemas up and down the country at showings of Rock Around the Clock featuring a chubby middle-aged American called Bill Haley and his band The Comets. I’d often attended the Saturday morning children’s showings of movies with Tarzan or Batman, when even an over-excited Ooh or Aah was suppressed by the uniformed staff who ceaselessly patrolled stamping out mischief. To me, the idea of dancing in the aisles was as unthinkable and dangerous as shoplifting or trying to pretend I was old enough to get a drink in a pub. Nice youngsters didn’t behave like that, and their nice parents forbad them to go see Rock Around the Clock unless accompanied by a responsible adult.

My friend John and I went to see it with John’s dad and to our disappointment, and secret relief, nothing happened. No girls in short skirts and leather jackets invited us to show them what we could do. No teddy boys flicked their quiffs and menaced us, not that they had anything to fear: we’d been taught to dance by our mothers breathing ONE-two-three in our ears, and jive was beyond us, never mind rock’n’roll.

I wasn’t a snob, I was ignorant. The only pop music I listened to was the stuff you couldn’t escape from, and when Paul and John Lennon were described as songwriters to be spoken of in the same breath as Schubert, I just shook my head. (I wasn’t a great fan of Schubert’s songs either.) When, at Penguin, we bought John Lennon’s book A Spaniard in the Works, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, even though these guys were my contemporaries and defined our entire era.

I was unable, like my brilliant colleague at Penguin, Tony Richardson - the first of my friends to die of cancer, aged 26 - to put aside the rigorous intellectual training Oxford was supposed to have given me (I got a Third), and just enjoy and appreciate the Beatles’ music and lyrics. There was obviously some visceral, instinctive appeal that affected people so much they abandoned restraint and wept and screamed and fought to get within touching distance of an extraordinary talent. Why was I so emotionally constipated and, worse, dismissive?

The answer is probably a combination of fear and envy. We’re all a bit scared of stuff we don’t understand, especially when feelings are involved, but rather than make the effort to analyze it, we pretend it doesn’t matter. We appear nonchalant, untouched, to hide our cowardice and laziness. And envy has something to do with it. We all think we could do as well as the Beatles in our own private sphere, given the right encouragement and circumstances. Perhaps by trying to get that close to them, people thought a little of their success might be transferred to them, like the touch of the king was once believed to cure scrofula.

When you make a god out of someone, you expect them listen to your prayers. If they don’t, you replace them with newer gods. Of course Paul and the Beatles are still being worshipped. But even that close encounter with a few of his fans hasn’t made me devout enough to keep up with his output.

Roland had had a row with his girlfriend Mona. She wanted a baby, he didn’t. He was thirty-two, a window cleaner who also played the drums, he had a nice life a kid would only muck up. He’d rather have a dog.

Roland and the dog looked at one another. ‘What’s your name?’ Roland said, finishing his Guinness and signalling the barman for another.

‘Horace,’ the dog said.

Roland looked around. Dogs don’t talk. ‘What?’ he said.

‘Horace,’ the dog repeated. ‘Are you a little deaf?’

‘I could be,’ Roland replied. ‘I play in this band. Why Horace?’

‘I had no choice in the matter. I wasn’t consulted, were you? What’s your name?’

‘Roland. And no, no one asked me either.’

‘Who are you talking to, Roland?’ the barman asked, putting his drink down.

‘Horace, who else?’ Roland said. The barman looked around. There was no one else in the immediate vicinity. The barman nodded and went off. It wasn’t his business.

‘When did you learn to talk, Horace?’

‘When did you learn to listen, Roland?

‘Can you read as well?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Roland. Everyone talks to a dog like a baby, expecting it to reply. Do you expect a baby to read? No. Do you expect a dog to do what a baby can’t? No.’

‘Fair enough,’ Roland said. He looked the dog up and down. He was a mongrel who behaved with the confidence of a pedigree champion: reddish-brown, sleek head and ears, sensitive narrow muzzle, intelligent brown eyes, neat paws, an elegant tail with a ball of fur at the end which he flourished like an old-fashioned music hall artist waving his hat on his stick.

Roland, on the other hand, was not looking his best. His hair was lank and long, his build was getting paunchy, his face was blotchy, his stubble greying, his eyes were bloodshot from drinking with his mates the previous night, which had kicked off the row with Mona. He hadn’t bothered to change his clothes, and when the row had reached force 5 he had just walked out, hoping to find someone in the pub he usually drank in who would understand his grievance and take his side.

Well, he’d found Horace. ‘Buy you a drink?’ he suggested.

‘That’s very kind,’ Horace said, ‘but I don’t touch alcohol. Don’t let that stop you, however.’

Roland took a pull of his Guinness. He played with the string attached to Horace’s collar, then dropped it on the ground.

‘You don’t need anyone holding onto you, do you?’ he said.

‘It’s not strictly necessary,’ Horace said. ‘My previous patron, Jake, felt it added to the pathos of his situation. Certainly people were generous when I gave them my Princess Diana look from between my paws.’ He demonstrated by lying down, raising his head, then lowering his eyes.

‘Nice,’ Roland said. ‘Homeless, was he?’

‘By choice,’ Horace said. ‘He was something of an ascetic, with a decided aversion to material possessions. His partner Marie-Louise was an acquisitive person, and clashed with him frequently on the subject of what was and what wasn’t suitable for the flat they rented together. Jake offered to leave, Marie-Louise accepted his offer, he took a small bag – and I mean small: it held his toothbrush, toothpaste, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius – and left for the life of a pilgrim, taking me with him.’

‘He sounds like a bit of an arse.’

‘There are many who would agree with you.’

‘Is he coming back for you?’

‘I rather doubt it. He was unable to counter my views on his behaviour. He said I sapped his confidence, and would prefer to leave me to my own devices.’

‘But he asked me to look after you,’ Roland said, drinking more Guinness.

‘A gesture,’ Horace, ‘typical of someone who cannot tell the difference between selfless and selfish. Please don’t feel under any obligation. I shall manage perfectly well. How about yourself?’

‘Me? I’m fine! Don’t worry about me!’ Roland said.

‘You don’t look fine, if I may say so without giving offence. You are drinking on your own, at a seasonal turning -point in the year when getting drunk with one’s friends is the normal thing to do, and you have no one to talk to but a dog.’

‘I was drinking with my mates last night. That’s what caused the row with Mona.’

‘Tell me about Mona,’ Horace said.

‘She wants kids, I don’t,’ Roland said.

‘Why not?’

‘They take up all your spare time. They use up all your money. As soon as they can talk they give you lip, and the moment they get into trouble they blame you for it.’

‘They might, if properly encouraged, look after you in old age when no one else is willing to do it. My own species is renowned for its loyalty, regardless of past treatment.’

‘Yeah, well, Mona isn’t a dog, is she?’ Roland said. ‘She also thinks I spend too much time with the band.’

‘Is the band successful?’

‘We get the odd gig. But we’ll never get anything if we don’t keep practising, will we?’

‘And practising involves drinking in places like this?’

‘Yeah, well, it’s a sociable thing, isn’t it? Sometimes girlfriends come along – Mona knows she’s always welcome.’

‘Why doesn’t she attend?’

‘She says she’ll have no one to talk to. She’s not a big drinker, she says it’s boring watching everyone else get rat-arsed.’

‘Would she by any chance like a canine companion?’

Roland emptied his glass and banged it down on the bar. He looked at Horace. ‘Would you be interested?’ he asked.

‘I might be,’ Horace said. ‘Is she a good listener?’

‘Sometimes,’ Roland said. ‘I’m sure she’d find you – irresistible.’

‘People have said that about me before. It’s flattering, but not invariably accurate.’

‘You’re just being modest,’ Roland said, getting off his bar stool. ‘You’ll soften her up, and everything will be sorted.’ He picked up Horace’s string. ‘You don’t mind if I...’

‘Feel free,’ Horace said. ‘I can act obedient, even submissive, when required. It has proved not unsuccessful in the past.’

‘She’ll love you!’ Roland said enthusiastically. ‘And you and me – let me just say, I don’t forget a friend.’

‘I do hope,’ Horace said, ‘you won’t be disappointed.’

He trotted after Roland as he left the pub and they walked a couple of blocks to the terraced house whose ground floor was occupied by Roland and Mona.

Roland noticed a lot of black plastic bags piled up on the front steps. ‘What...?’ he said.

‘Are those your belongings?’ Horace enquired.

‘If they are,’ Roland said confidently, ‘they’re going straight back inside, once she realizes who I’ve brought along.’

‘I think,’ Horace said, ‘that you may be exaggerating my powers to change the situation.’

‘Bollocks!’ Roland said. ‘Wait till she sees you!’

He marched up to the front door, but before he could insert his key it was opened by a young woman, Mona, who blocked his entrance.

Roland said, ‘Just hang on a minute, Mona. There’s someone here who can explain everything!’

He stood aside to reveal Horace, who did his best to look bashful. Mona beamed. She took the string Roland held out to her and tugged it gently. Horace, ever obliging, trotted inside.

‘And you won’t believe this, Mona,’ Roland said, about to follow Horace, ‘but...’

The door was slammed in his face. ‘...he talks,’ Roland said.

Sadly, there was no one to hear him.

He said that to a lot of people. He was generous with his encouragement. Generous, full stop. When he was Professor Poetry at Oxford he hoovered up starstruck undergraduates, even those like me who never wrote or even appreciated poetry, and entertained them in the house he’d rented on Boar’s Hill, to the bemused tolerance of his wife Beryl and a scattering of his children.

It was the same when, a few years later, I went to interview him for the Paris Review, of which I’d been made an Advisory Editor by George Plimpton who, like me, spent a lot of evenings at Elaine’s Restaurant on Second Avenue and 88th Street in Manhattan. The food was lousy but the company was amazing (and will be the subject of another post): on getting the gig, I flew from London to Deya in Majorca, where Robert Graves had lived for many years in a house he mostly built himself. I spent the journey trying to read, and have intelligent thoughts about, a representative sample of his works, which numbered well over a hundred. Some of them were so well-known I was sure I’d read them already.

Holding forth about a book you hadn’t actually read is common among literary types, especially when drink has been taken. It is very much less acceptable if you’ve been commissioned to ask a literary legend penetrating questions as part of a celebrated series designed to illuminate nothing less than the art of writing.

It didn’t start well. I’d brought a little recording machine, but as soon as I’d found a place for it on the rickety table covered in books and papers and pottery and pens - he favored Japanese felt-tips - Robert told me to put it away. Maybe he felt a recording would not properly reflect the restless and fluid nature of our interview, during which he strode out to prune the trees in his orchard, picked some carrots, sliced a few beans, and rolled and smoked endless cigarettes. When I got him sitting down, he fiddled continuously with the reading stand he used because of a childhood neck injury, corrected his manuscripts by running a thick black line through various passages and inserting new lines in an italic hand that was quite difficult to read and, obviously bored, trimmed his nails with an enormous pair of scissors that were more like pruning shears.

Maybe he didn’t like having his voice recorded: it was sibilant, precise, very much officer class, and oddly camp for someone who had the build, the presence, the broken nose, and the constantly dancing fidgets of a boxer. Or maybe he didn’t enjoy wasting his time being interviewed and wanted to see me work for my money, even though I was only getting paid expenses. I’d managed to persuade him to let me come and badger him for a few days purely on the strength of our acquaintance that had started in Oxford.

It might be a stretch to call it a friendship, but once when we were both in London he sportingly agreed to come to tea with a girl I was briefly in love with, and for some reason I now realize was entirely fatuous I thought having two famous writers dropping in - the other was Kingsley Amis - would somehow impress her. Robert ended his visit by having a pee in the yard where the dustbins were kept; my relationship with the girl finished in a similarly damp dribble. At least I learned it’s a waste of time trying to exploit a celebrity connection in the hope that my failings would be invisible in the glare of their fame.

I also had my doubts about my suitability to interview Robert. I didn’t do sufficient homework to know what I was talking about; worse, my questions were more those of a gossip columnist than someone with the intellectual heft and boldness to ask what he meant and argue about his answers. I had an Oxford degree, but it was a Third in History, not a First in Eng Lit. I could bullshit with the best in a bar, but that wasn’t enough to really engage the mind of a master. When I sent him my transcript to approve, he made a large number of corrections, and understandably complained that if he’d realized how much work was involved, he’d never agreed to be interviewed in the first place. Despite which George Plimpton somehow persuaded him to allow a proper intellectual, who’d published a lot more than I had at that stage, to do a follow-up for the Review. We were both credited, but Robert’s serious answers, some of which I still don’t understand, were in response to a better mind than mine.

The last time I saw him was with my wife Rosie, after he’d done a poetry reading at the Festival Hall. Rosie said I went all pale before introducing them, which was absolutely not because I was trying to impress her, but because I was concerned that he might not remember me. He did, and was very civil, but soon after that he developed dementia, which must have been an additional trial for his wife, who had over the years put up with his many infatuations, apparently platonic, with much younger women.

He knew about love, though, and over the years I’ve acquired some knowledge of it myself: its tensile strength, its powerful heat, its astonishing depth, its ability to surprise, its overwhelming generosity. I think he would approve.

We said of course we didn’t mind. It was one of those summers you’d like to think your youth consisted of, in the days when the weather experts couldn’t decide whether we were all going to burn or freeze to death, when the sky was bright blue and the sun brought out the fifty shades of green in the trees and dried the grass so it didn’t need mowing and the heat was perfectly bearable. The kind of weather that makes you think everything was brighter and better and easier back then, though it only takes one dreary drizzly day to make you realize grey is normal and there’s always stuff to grumble about.

We’d met the novelist Iris Murdoch when we were still in London and our pair of farmworkers’ cottages in what was then unfashionable Oxfordshire were being knocked into shape for our new married life, with our plans for children, cats, dogs, and chickens sliding off the drawing board into reality. Iris and her husband John Bayley lived in a lovely old stone cottage in Steeple Aston, in the same part of Oxfordshire as we were - John was a professor of English at Oxford and Iris was an emeritus fellow in philosophy as well as a prolific novelist. The year before our party she’d won the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea, and I’d worked with her on a pitch to get her novel The Nice and the Good televised by ITV.

The book had everything a tv audience could desire: lust, corruption, infidelity, death, danger, love, and a touch of satanism. Also philosophy, and a dog. ITV, who had briefly hired me to give them ideas for offbeat drama, got quite excited, then said no. Iris was neither surprised nor disappointed. The only thing she regretted was that I’d had to omit a couple of her characters to keep the cast size manageable.

‘I understand, old thing,’ she said, ‘but they become like family.’ Of which, in real life, she had only her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, but was still very sociable.

Her mother arrived at our party with the sort of hat a proper lady would wear to take tea with the Queen at Buckingham Palace. We provided her with a chair in the middle of the lawn, from which she waved regally to the assembled company. Iris’s husband John, a balding, bespectacled, bird-like man who chirruped enthusiastically about everything from wine to wild mushrooms - ‘never eat anything that grows on something else, such as a tree’ - draped a tea towel on his arm and went round filling people’s glasses, including his mother-in-law’s. ‘She thinks the party is for her,’ he explained, ‘and she’s very happy.’

Iris kept an eye on her, but she was much more interested in talking to our friends, including a farmer who’d flirted with communism before becoming a Labour county councillor. As someone who had actually been a member of the communist party, Iris took issue with our friend on a number of topics, and argued with amicable heat over his support of the IRA. She came up to me shaking her head. ‘He’s got them all wrong,’ she said, ‘but then he’s not Irish. I am.’

Following our party, we were invited to dinner in Steeple Aston. The hall and ground-floor rooms of their cottage were full of leaves that had blown in from their large untidy garden, which had a couple of meandering paths half-heartedly mown among grass that had long gone to seed. Inside, most of the leaves had landed up against the skirting-boards, as neither John nor Iris cared about sweeping and dusting. Iris had commented on how tidy our living-room was and asked who did the cleaning. When we said we did, she shook her head and wondered where we found the time - not in a pitying or patronizing tone, more in surprise that if you were busy writing, you would bother about things like dirt or debris.

Their bedroom was only remarkable because the pile of gossipy magazines on one side of the double bed they shared belonged to John, and the academic journals on the other side to Iris. But then John was on record as describing sex as ‘ridiculous’, whereas Iris had affairs with both men and women, which were apparently sometimes witnessed by her husband.

Their cooking was idiosyncratic, as the best cooking is. Gourmet food it was not: a lot of it came from tins, which perhaps harked back to their wartime experiences, though the Oxford of the 1970s knew more about roux than rissoles. What I most remember was the dessert John had made: rice crispies (in Rosie’s memory it was muesli) over which he had poured melted chocolate. Interesting, but neither of them fussed over either the content or the presentation of food, whereas we believed in making a real effort, despite having young children who could be difficult at mealtimes. Maybe we should have followed Iris and John’s example: when we first moved to our village, our friends flocked to stay with us, convinced we’d be back in town within weeks, and would meanwhile be starved of intellectual stimulus. As most of them were writers, they came during the week, not just at weekends, and expected three meals a day, which we attempted to make appetizing for our own sake as well as our guests’. It was like running an hotel, but it was our own fault. John and Iris would never have let that happen: though they were very sociable, their work took priority. Possibly that’s another reason my books weren’t instant bestsellers the way Iris’s were: Rosie and I still discuss food more than any other subject.

John and Iris eventually sold their cottage and moved into Oxford’s Summertown. Iris began to lose her creative energy, which John at first thought was caused by depression. I reminded him of the long depression Rossini endured, from which he emerged to write some of his most beautiful work, though it was very different from his operas. John was a little cheered by this, but it soon became obvious Iris had inherited her mother’s Alzheimer’s. I wish we could have given a party just for her.

I’d landed up there when I was fired, in person, by my boss Tony Godwin, the Chief Editor of Penguin Books, who had sent me, their youngest editor, to find out why Penguin America wasn’t doing as well as they hoped.

I was 23, not known for my diplomatic skills, and I decided the easiest and most direct way of discovering what was going on was to ask people in the New York publishing scene for their thoughts.

Within minutes of my first interview, the editor I’d been talking to was on the phone to the guy who ran Penguin America, wondering if he knew that some dumb British kid was asking dumb questions about him. The Penguin guy rang Tony, who flew over to apologize, and fire me for putting him in such an embarrassing position. He apologized for that too, and offered to give me a reference for another job in British publishing, but after I’d recovered from the shock - what was wrong with being honest and straightforward? - I blew my nose and said I’d rather stay in New York for a while, as I’d sort of fallen in love with it.

I’d only packed for a week’s stay, I was living on expenses, it was the fall of 1964, I had no responsibilities or long-term plans other than earning enough to be a full-time author, though I had no idea whether I should try a novel or persevere as a scriptwriter, despite the cold water poured on that ambition by Don Ogden Stewart (see my earlier post). It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t get a job in New York, I knew nothing about work permits or green cards, I was full of fathomless ignorance and equally boundless confidence, and aware that my British accent was considered quite cute. Who wouldn’t want to employ a promising young editor who’d just been sacked for incompetence?

First I had to find a cheaper place to live than the old Royalton, into which Penguin had booked me, and whose most appealing feature, it seemed to me, was its ‘Magic Fingers’, an automatic massage device attached to the bed. It promised that if you put in a quarter you would be gently lulled to sleep by its soothing motion, which sounded irresistible to someone suffering from jetlag, and the aftermath of a bad oyster at my London farewell lunch that led to me being sick in a Regent Street shop where my mother was helping me choose a winter coat to equip me for my first trip to America.

I put in my quarter. The ‘Magic Fingers’ cranked into action. It was like trying to sleep on a hard bed on an old train that was constantly clacking over points. I lay there stiff, sore, and shaking long after my quarter ran out. Maybe not the best introduction to the city, but things could only get better, right? Such as getting fired.

All I knew of the Chelsea Hotel was that it was cheap, bohemian, and Dylan Thomas had died there, from the booze. The elevator was operated by a (to me) elderly gent in a shabby shiny uniform who claimed to have letters from Eugene O’Neill. I took a small room with a single bed and a grimy washbasin. I wrote letters (we didn’t have email then) to all my friends in UK publishing telling them what had happened, where I was, and if they knew anyone who might give me a job in New York.

One of them told me Arthur Miller was also living in the Chelsea and said I should use her name if I wanted to meet him. She also gave me the contact details of one of her American writers and said I might enjoy seeing her. I was in bed with her when I was offered (by telephone) a job with Victor Weybright, who had himself run Penguin America until he too was fired by Sir Allen Lane, Penguin’s founder and chairman, and set up New American Library, which rapidly became the biggest and most successful paperback publisher in America.

A pleasing symmetry there, we both thought, and when I started work I had a desk in Victor’s outer office. One day he introduced me to Ayn Rand, on their way to lunch. She was a small lady with pinched features, penetrating eyes, and a floor-length fur coat: I’d never read her work, and only knew that her views on the primacy of the individual over the collective were opposed to my own, and had made her a bestseller. She reminded me of my brief encounter with the Queen, except her hair was less bouffant, and I have remembered it because who forgets meeting a legend? Legends are memorable because of their achievements, even if you don’t rate them very highly, and seeing them in the flesh reminds you how human they are. That slight resentment most of us have about others’ successes, especially if we are not as successful as we expected to be, enables us to boast of our encounter at the same time as belittling it. It has no effect on the legend, but it makes us feel better.

In between job-seeking and sex, I dropped Arthur Miller a note and suggested a coffee in the lobby. He was the kind of writer I aspired to be, apart from having been married to Marilyn Monroe: principled, dramatizing serious issues by making the political personal, standing up for progressive causes, being venerated by respectable critics while making serious money. Our meeting lasted maybe ten minutes. He was taller than I had imagined, with serious glasses and a serious expression on a face that was furrowed rather than wrinkled, wearing (as I recall) a white T-shirt under an open-necked shirt (I wore a tie). He was courteous rather than friendly, and I couldn’t help wondering what on earth Marilyn, that goddess to all schoolboys of my generation, saw in him.

Our meeting nevertheless confirmed my ambition to be taken seriously as a playwright, and the only other time I encountered him was many years afterwards, when we both had plays on at what was then the Haymarket Theatre, in Leicester - his in the studio, mine in the main house. I saw his, which was very short - I think he’d dramatized it from a story. As far as I know he never saw mine, which was about a brass band that bumbled along perfectly happily until a newcomer tried to whip them into professional shape, which caused them to fall apart. It was called All Together Now, it required a cast of sixteen people who could play brass instruments as well as act, and it taken as a critique of Thatcher’s Britain, though all I’d intended was an affectionate portrait of my local band. It very nearly made it to London’s West End, and if it had, maybe I would have given Mr Miller a run for his money.

I lacked his seriousness, yet that brief meeting at the Chelsea somehow cast a glow, like a stained-glass window, on my time in New York, kicking off a fantastic year that ended with me being drafted into the US army with the threat of being sent to fight in Vietnam.

If you had a green card, which thanks to Victor I had easily obtained, then you’re liable to the draft. As someone in their twenties, with no ties to US voters, I was perfect cannon-fodder. I took legal advice, and was advised to say I was gay, a drug-addict, or a communist. I demurred, partly because I’m a terrible liar (I reckon my honesty caused me to be fired), and partly because I discovered that one of the conditions I had signed up to when getting my permit was that I wouldn’t seek exemption from the draft. I rather hoped they would find me unfit to fight - the only exercise I got, apart from sex, was marching on anti-Vietnam demonstrations - but to my astonishment I was classified 1A (those were desperate times).

Rather than being returned in a body bag I left America and full-time publishing to try and become a full-time writer. I may have had certain doubts about Ayn Rand and Arthur Miller, but I was inspired by their royalties.

Hepburn’s American book agent was an eccentric who seemed very concerned that we behaved properly towards her star, which was slightly insulting considering Rosie had been to finishing school and I was supposedly a scholar and a gentleman. Not to mention someone who’d worked in New York as a publisher until threatened with the draft, and who had since written several books and scripts.

I suggested buying some flowers, and we found a florist on our way to Turtle Bay on a wet and windy fall evening. It was the week the Berlin wall fell, there was excitement in the air that we could feel even though we were still a bit jet-lagged, and Hepburn’s agent finally approved a small bunch of assorted blooms, which I was clutching when we arrived at the front door of Hepburn’s narrow town house, on the dot of whatever time it was we were due.

The agent fussed over us like an anxious mother making sure her children looked smart enough for a party given by people who were out of her league. She greeted Hepburn’s Irish housekeeper effusively - an effusiveness that was not returned - and we were shown up some steep stairs to a first-floor sitting room, small, maybe somewhat over-furnished, and certainly over-supplied with bouquets of flowers that made our posy look like something I’d hastily plucked from a neighboring garden.

We waited. The agent seemed more nervous than we were. We heard footsteps descending from above. The agent leant forward and hissed, ‘You won’t forget to stand up when she comes in, right?’ I was about to slap her down with a hiss of my own when Hepburn entered, small, trembly (she had Parkinson’s), her hair casually and elegantly piled up in her trademark bun, face powdered, lips rouged, eyes sparkling, in a trouser suit worn with white trainers.

She said, in that posh Yankee twang, ‘I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.’

I heard myself say, ‘Not at all. Have you been out running?’

There was a short silence. I thought - hoped - the agent would explode. Then Hepburn laughed and said, ‘I wish. What can I give you to drink? Gin and tonic? All I have to do is get some ice.’

We protested we didn’t want to be any trouble. She said it was absolutely no trouble, and disappeared. When she reappeared, accompanied by the housekeeper, it was with glasses that were literally the size of goldfish bowls - the ones you win at funfairs - filled with ice and the strongest gin and tonic I have ever tasted. I remembered to present her with our pathetic bunch of flowers. She said how fresh they were, and that she would have them put straight in her bedroom. I remarked that she seemed to have plenty of flowers around. The housekeeper said quietly that it was Miss Hepburn’s birthday. The agent didn’t know? Ha!

As if to make the point, the phone rang - a proper old-fashioned phone with a receiver - and Hepburn answered it herself. She was quite short with whoever had called, politely thanking them for their good wishes, but saying she was ‘with some friends’. That was us. We were friends with Katharine Hepburn!

She asked Rosie about the foreign publishers she’d sold the book to, and was both interested in and enthusiastic about her replies (in fact she had previously sent a hand-written letter thanking Rosie for making her first foreign sale). We talked about her American editor, Sonny Mehta, who we knew well - he’d sent a car to collect us from JFK and took us out to dinner on our first night, before the jetlag set in. Hepburn shook her head. She told us she called at his office but he was out, and his desk was such a mess she’d left him a note saying ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’.

I mentioned that I knew Don Ogden Stewart (see my previous post about our meeting). Hepburn relaxed completely and we gossiped about Don’s frightening wife Ella - ‘she doesn’t like women, especially if they’re handsome,’ she said, with an approving look at Rosie; about ‘Spence’, her long-time lover Spencer Tracy, who refused to divorce his wife and marry Hepburn because he was a Catholic; about her father, who encouraged her to take a daily dip in the ocean regardless of the season, which she said she still did whenever she could.

I couldn’t help thinking, and feeling slightly smug, that the agent was mostly left out of our conversation, which was interrupted by the arrival of her niece to share her birthday dinner. Hepburn apologized that we couldn’t join them, and we politely protested we wouldn’t dream of imposing, though of course if we’d been asked we would have cancelled everything to accept.

She insisted her chauffeur drive us back to our mid-town hotel in her white Cadillac, as it was raining, and waited with us until he arrived with the car, showing me a copper bull she’d bought which had some connection, I’ve forgotten what, with Don and Ella, and jokingly complaining that her neighbor was a nice young man but sometimes kept her awake playing the piano. His name was Steven Sondheim.

Did we kiss her goodbye? I’m not sure, but she stood and waved until the chauffeur drove off, and we basked in the elation you get from winning a very special prize you never expected. We had another gin-and-tonic to keep the excitement flowing, then Rosie and I were supposed to go and have a Mexican meal with an old friend. To show I was properly brought up, I invited the agent to join us, but thankfully she refused. Rosie said she couldn’t keep her eyes open, but I was still fizzing, so the friend and I went to the restaurant where I made the mistake of asking for a Margarita. It arrived in a bowl the size of the ones we’d been presented with by Hepburn, and though I finished most of it, I couldn’t eat a thing, and was very boring company.

I wrote a thank-you letter to Hepburn, though. Without the agent prompting me.

We all agreed, the Gaitskells and me, about the evils of apartheid and the need to boycott South African goods until the regime either collapsed or changed its policies. I spent one Saturday morning with the younger Gaitskell daughter leafletting shops and shoppers in Hampstead High Street. It was both exhilarating and scary: some people took the leaflets and smiled their approval, others screwed them up angrily and threw them away, which surprised both of us - how could anyone disagree with us when we were on the right side of history?

We came to a greengrocer’s where both our parents had accounts. The manager knew us, and glanced at the leaflet while we tried to explain why he shouldn’t stock Outspan oranges. He gave us a look of honest puzzlement. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Are you worried about the [n-word] handling them at the other end?’

As neither of us could think of an adequate reply, we made our excuses and left for the nearest coffee bar. We hadn’t changed any minds, but our failure brought us closer, and having done our bit for the cause, we could talk about other things, such as music.

She was a Frank Sinatra fan, whereas I’d never heard him sing - if we played records in our house, they were of classical music. Not that we were all highbrow and serious, just that if we weren’t watching television we were usually arguing - my brother and sister were just entering adolescence as I was leaving it. Anyway, I tried to like Sinatra for the Gaitskells’ sake, and I couldn’t see or hear what gave them goosebumps. Maybe that was another thing that led us to gradually drift apart. Certainly my low opinion of Sinatra was confirmed when I met him in person a few years later, at a party in New York. His security guys separated me from the girl I was passionately in love with at the time because he wanted to dance with her. I objected, and was overruled. There are some degrees of fame you can’t argue with.

The main effect Gaitskell had on me was to highlight the gap between my public and private behavior. I had marched and demonstrated in favor of nuclear disarmament and happily cheered the speeches denouncing Gaitskell’s policy - he’d successfully persuaded the 1961 Party Conference to endorse a multilateral approach, and as a result was widely tipped to become Prime Minister at the next election.

Suddenly I had visions of being invited to Downing Street parties by his daughters. This, I’m slightly ashamed to confess, ensured I ruffled no feathers in Hampstead with talk of politics. I certainly didn’t boast of the fact that I’d nearly been arrested at a sit-down in Trafalgar Square, only escaping because I went for a pee just before the police moved in. When I went to his house and enjoyed watching the Left’s favorite bogeyman being teased by his children and told off by his wife - she had stuck with him despite the rumors that he’d had an affair with the wife of Ian Fleming - I found him impossible to hate. After all, doesn’t every politician’s career end in failure?

Gaitskell never did win an election to become Prime Minister, and he died very suddenly in 1963. I was sad for his daughters, and went to his memorial service, mingling with many who had previously attacked him with real venom. They praised him for his decency, consistency, and for sticking to his principles, even though they vehemently disagreed with them. That’s the thing about celebrity: you can despise it at the same time as warming yourself at its glow.

Maybe I’ll even end up appreciating Sinatra.

Don was also one of the many writers, directors, and actors who mushroomed from the original Hollywood Ten blacklisted during the 1950s McCarthy period, when anyone suspected of left-wing sympathies was labelled a communist and denied work. Don moved to Hampstead, where there was a large colony of ‘Bollinger Bolsheviks’ whose views were progressive and whose lifestyle was luxurious. My parents were among them, which is how I got to meet Don. He and his fiery wife Ella Winter had bought or rented a house in leafy Frognal where Ramsay Macdonald had lived, the first Labour Prime Minister, who was regarded as a traitor by many of his party for entering a coalition with the Tories during the Depression. Back-stabbing is the left’s favorite exercise, and disapproval their most common quality. Ella Winter seemed to disapprove of a lot of things, but she and Don gave terrific parties, often to raise money for the causes my generation regularly demonstrated about.

Don was a tall, thin, balding, genial, and generous man, and though I regarded script-writing as an inferior form of authorship to writing plays for the theatre - glitzy prostitution compared to the serious business of drama - I was persuaded by my loving parents to show him the play I’d been working on while holidaying with them in Italy.

I was in my early twenties, and I knew I wanted to be a writer - the lifestyle I envisaged involved getting up around ten, writing for a couple of hours before enjoying a spot of lunch, possibly with other writers whose talent was less than mine, returning to revise or write some more of what I’d done in the morning, and knocking off around six for cocktails, to be followed by whatever entertainment was on offer to refresh the creative spirit.

The trouble was I didn’t know what I wanted to write, except that I trusted it would be successful enough to release me from the need to work for anyone else, even though I was enjoying my job in publishing. I was in my early twenties. I had a third-class Oxford degree and first-class ambitions. I regarded other writers with the indulgence that I might try and blame on the ‘air of effortless superiority’ my old college, Balliol, cultivated. I was prepared to put in the effort, and it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t succeed.

I was intrigued by the story of John Wilkes, an eighteenth-century rake, libertine, orator, and provocative journalist. He was not from an aristocratic background - his father was a distiller - he wasn’t rich, and he certainly wasn’t good-looking - he had a terrible squint - yet he boasted that given half an hour’s start, he could seduce the prettiest wench away from the handsomest man in England. He was a leading light in the orgies of the Hell Fire Club, where sexual acts involving not only women but also monkeys supposedly took place. He became an MP thanks to the patronage of one of his noble friends, and started a journal critical of the king and his ministers. This got him charged with libel, of which he was acquitted, but the government obtained his privately distributed licentious pamphlet ‘Essay on Women’ and charged him with obscenity, which led to a duel, a brief exile, and nearly two years in jail. Despite his outrageous personal behavior he became a symbol of free speech and described himself as ‘a friend of liberty’. I was a young man not confident of his looks, lacking sexual experience, but burning to make a mark as a friend of liberty. Are you surprised I decided to bring Wilkes alive nearly two centuries after his death, when the sexual freedoms of the 1960s were still being prosecuted as obscene?

On holiday, I worked every morning on my play, starting straight after breakfast and going on until it was too hot to avoid a swim in the sea. I had briefly tried a regime where I got up at dawn and wrote until it was time to go to the office, but what I found was that when I got home and looked over what I’d written, it was as if it had been penned by a complete stranger. At six pm I couldn’t understand the thought processes that had filled the pages at six am. On holiday I was determined to start when my brain and body were in gear. And the story seemed to flow. Despite my profound ignorance of orgies I managed to get some sex in, between political discussions on matters that seemed very relevant to my own time.

I refused to show the play to my parents, but was sufficiently confident to let Don Ogden Stewart take a look. After a couple of weeks of silence, he invited me round for a drink. I was hoping to hear how marvelous it was, or at least get some minor, but helpful, criticism.

‘Toots,’ he said - he called everyone ‘Toots’ - ‘this isn’t a play, it’s a series of people making speeches at each other. Let me mix you a whisky sour. Do you know what I would have been if I hadn’t gone into the movies? A bartender. I do a mean martini.’

I was so surprised I didn’t have room to be devastated. Nor could I summon the strength or courage to ask for more detail. What he meant became obvious the more I thought about it, especially with a second cocktail. He wasn’t trying to destroy my confidence, he was saying what I guess I suspected as I kept referring to my research notes during writing: a drama needs something to happen, not just have it talked about. Characters need to react, not just act; to be changed, not just outraged; to show doubt, not constant certainty. And people don’t talk in perfectly crafted paragraphs, their thoughts spool out in broken sentences. They change their minds, they change others’ minds, their actions lead to reactions that are surprising, not predictable.

Don Ogden Stewart taught me all that with one sentence and several cocktails. I went home and put aside John Wilkes. I turned instead to a story my sister had told me, about playing The Truth Game with her schoolfriends. They persuaded her she was the only virgin in her circle, so she went out and lost her virginity, only to discover her friends had been lying and were virgins still. I wrote it as a half-hour television play and it got me an agent. It also resulted in my mother not speaking to me for a couple of weeks because she thought the play showed incestuous desire. The boss of the agency that took me on apparently read the play and commented, ‘If this is the sort of filth we’re taking on these days, I’m glad I’m retiring.’ The play never got produced, but it led to other commissions, and to me moving into my own flat.

I felt like a proper writer, and all thanks to Don. And John Wilkes.

To be honest, I had solicited this invitation from a girl who’d been nice to me when I was being dumped. She was part of the aristocratic circle who owned estates in the north of England and were always in and out of each other’s ancestral homes, having tea after tramping across gloomy moors killing things, including my amatory hopes. The corpses were hung outside, like criminals used to be, until they were ready to be gutted, skinned, cooked and eaten. The animals, obviously, not the criminals.

I was no aristocrat, I couldn’t kill anything, but I believed myself to be passionately in love with the sister of a boy I was at Oxford with. I was invited to their house in Northumberland and pursued the poor girl relentlessly. I wasn’t desperate to sleep with her - I wouldn’t have known what to do, as my sexual knowledge was limited to a book my father gave me on the human body, along with one on the working of a car engine, and I got the mechanics inexplicably confused. But I wanted her to love me as I loved her, to have her moved by the things that moved me, to share the burden of my ignorance and see her make light of it.

It was too much to expect. We talked through one entire night, after which she refused to see me anymore. I felt about as lively as the birds hanging in the barn. I wanted to leave, but there were no trains. Thrilled by my own tragedy, I went on long walks, sometimes accompanied by friendly girls who weren’t in love, didn’t understand, but were prepared to listen. One of them suggested I attend her coming-of-age party when I returned to London. I couldn’t imagine celebrating anything ever again. What, seeing people talking to each other, laughing, drinking, having a good time when I was doomed to be alone forever?

I got home and marinated myself in misery. My parents didn’t understand, my friends were as sympathetic as anyone is to someone who looks fine but has self-diagnosed a terminal disease. It was a couple of weeks before I started my first job, in publishing, and I got bored. I remembered the coming-of-age party, and rang the girl’s London home. Her mother answered, sighed when I explained that her daughter had sort-of asked me, and said she would send me an invitation.

Which is how I found myself in St James’s Palace, an ancient pile not far from Piccadilly, whose low-key grandeur was quite soothing to a bruised spirit. I felt that mixture of apprehension and self-pity familiar to the solo guest, and once my name had been checked I entered a room full of people, all of whom seemed to know one another.

I quickly realized I didn’t know any of them, and looked around for my hostess. I couldn’t see her, so the next thing I looked for was a drink. A waitress with a tray of filled glasses hovered nearby, but when I went to take one she hurried off, as if I didn’t deserve serving. I thought maybe it was because I wasn’t wearing a dark suit, like many of the men present - mine was a light brown, which was alright in the country, but maybe a bit too casual for palace wear. But then I thought, this was a party for young people, people of my own generation, and we don’t have to conform to their sartorial standards. I glanced around for someone young who might agree with me, but there was no one nearby. It was then my eye fell on a guest who looked as miserable as I did.

She wasn’t young, exactly, but she was standing all on her own and no one was talking to her. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to her. She must be an actress, I thought (we called them ‘actresses’ then), and I was sure I’d remember who she was once we started a conversation. It was obvious she was as much in need of company and a drink as I was, and I started to move towards her, rehearsing what I would say. I was inclined to keep it light - ‘I see you haven’t got a glass either. Fine kind of party!’ - and offer to get us both one, which would show I was just as capable of old-fashioned gallantry as any dark-suited old codger. Or should I act the enthusiastic fan, and say, ‘I know your face. Do tell me what you’ve been in recently?’

As I got within touching distance, there was a bit of a commotion, and a woman I vaguely recognized as the mother of the girl who’d invited me appeared at the single lady’s side. ‘Your Majesty,’ she said, ‘may I introduce, er…’ She paused.

I mumbled my name automatically. Then all sorts of things I’d been taught, or half-remembered, jostled in my head. Do I bow? Do I hold out my hand? Should I have spoken before she spoke to me? What was she doing there? What was I? How could I possibly forget the name of someone whose face was engraved on the coins in my pocket? Is this the kind of behavior that would get me locked up in the Tower?

I took a step back and inclined my head in something between a nod and a shrug that felt totally inadequate. Then I remembered that the father of the girl whose party this was was one of the Queen’s top courtiers. That would explain her presence. How could I explain mine? Would the Queen be interested in the drama of my being rejected by someone who was vaguely part of her circle? Should I ask her about her family troubles, and not bother her with mine?

Our hostess came to my rescue. ‘Peter is going into publishing, Your Majesty,’ she said.

‘Yar?’ said the Queen, looking deeply uninterested. I thought, what can I say that will make her perk up? I wasn’t into dogs or horses, I couldn’t think of a book I’d read recently, it didn’t seem appropriate to discuss politics, and anyway mine would have been well to the left of Her Majesty’s.

People had dreams of the Queen, crediting her with solving their problems as if she was some sort of divinity. Would we exchange words that that could be life-changing, for me, never mind the nation? I opened my mouth, but our hostess made a sort of shooing gesture and I backed away. The Queen nodded in that regal manner that takes years of practice. I got myself a drink.

I was not a monarchist - in fact I had, and still have, republican leanings - so why was bumping into the Queen something I’ve never forgotten? Because of who she was, obviously, and the fact that, despite all the mystique surrounding her, she was still capable of being left on her own at a party. Most people who are presented to her have done something worthwhile: I was just a lovelorn stranger. Why would I think - why would anyone think that an encounter with majesty would have a profound effect? I wasn’t disappointed in her, but in myself, for not reacting more cleverly, wittily, engagingly. I had a chance to make my mark, and I blew it. Just as I had with the girl who had dropped me.

It did make a difference, though. Meeting the Queen, however briefly and accidentally, made me feel just a little bit special. And within a few months, before it had lost its luster as a story, I had lost my virginity.

Never heard of him? What’s the point in name-dropping if the name means nothing?

Paul (1898-1976) was an American singer famous for spirituals like Ol’ Man River, an actor who was the first black Othello since Ira Aldridge in 1825, a professional football player, and an activist in left-wing causes, which I guess is how I came to meet him, aged eight, with my father.

My dad, like Paul, was not actually a member of the communist party, but he sympathised with their objectives, especially when Mao Tsetung took power in China. The Cold War had succeeded World War II, Britain had a Labour government, there was still rationing of food and essential items, we’d moved to Hampstead from the village where I spent my early years, Chorleywood, because it was safer than the East End of London during the Blitz that killed my grandfather, just before I was born. So that I wouldn’t be orphaned, with my father fighting in Sierra Leone, my grandmother and mother had taken it in turns to travel to their shop, Amiel’s Corner, in the Mile End Road, that I remember selling confectionary. When the fighting was over, my father returned to his job as managing director of a chain of women’s dress shops, but his main interest was politics, and when China became the People’s Republic, he abandoned the shmutter business to set up a company trading with it, even though it was under an American embargo. I remember this principled shift because, instead of being dropped at school in an Austin Princess, it was a small Triumph Renown. I made him stop out of sight of the buildings and walked the last bit. The shame!

All this is to explain how my parents came to act as host when Paul Robeson arrived in London, despite the McCarthyism that had deprived him of work and income, to stand up for socialism.

He was an enormous man physically: tall, broad, with hands bigger than my head. There were photographers with cameras that had flashbulbs that popped and crackled, and I felt proud to be part of the delegation that greeted him, shy about the attention he gave me, and puzzled why my father seemed irritated by the questions the journalists asked.

I wonder what my mother thought of it all. She was pregnant with my brother, after several miscarriages that meant she had to spend a lot of time lying on her bed surrounded by my aunts and friends who sat around smoking cigarettes while I, who had been accustomed to having her undivided attention, was told not to bother her.

When food and money were scarce, and she wasn’t physically strong, what did she feel about giving lunch to a celebrity and a host of hangers-on who vociferously supported causes that were unpopular with the mainstream? It was an honour, of course, to entertain a man whose fame bordered on notoriety - he and his wife had split up, not for the first time, when, playing Othello, he had an affair with his Desdemona, Peggy Ashcroft - but while my mother was loyally supportive, I bet she would have preferred peace and quiet.

For me, the occasion was marked by embarrassment. Paul sat me on his lap - I was eight, for God’s sake! Laps were for babies! - and he then proceeded to entertain the company by singing to them, and me. I was a small squirming boy sitting on the knee of this huge man and I could feel the vibrations of his deep voice twanging through his entire body.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, my father brought in one of my school exercise books where I had written an essay that had won high praise from my teacher. To my horror, Paul took the book, and wrote a message on the back cover.

We had all been told that defacing our exercise books was a punishable offence. I was told to say thank you to Paul, and I’m sure I did, but I trembled to think what would happen to me when I took the book into school and the defacement would be noticed. I would be shamed in front of everyone and penalised for something I didn’t even do! Where was the justice in that?

I was so fretful after Paul had gone that my father asked what was wrong. I told him. He laughed. He said he was sure the school would understand. It was a big thing, to have a personal inscription from someone so famous. It was big for me in an entirely different way, and I insisted he accompany me to school the following day and explain to the head teacher why her rules had been broken.

I should mention that, though he was a socialist, he had sent me to a private preparatory school where the political sentiment was overwhelmingly conservative. To him, Paul Robeson was a hero. To my head teacher, he was a godless black communist. She graciously accepted my father’s explanation, and I wasn’t punished, though no one was particularly impressed by my autograph. None of this meant much to me at the time, but politics became more real to me a couple of years later, when I stood as the Labour candidate in a mock election and promised, as the grandson of sweetshop owners, to end rationing on confectionary. I got one vote, from my friend Wingate. I was shattered and disillusioned, and my favourite teacher consoled me by suggesting it was so much nicer and easier being part of the majority. When I got home, I announced that I was going to be a conservative. My father was not amused.

The next time I met Paul, he was once more playing Othello at Stratford, opposite Mary Ure. I was a student at Oxford, got tickets, and took a friend I was keen to impress who happened to have a car. I sent a note backstage reminding Paul of when we last met, and we went to see him afterwards in his dressing room. What I remember from that conversation was that he was terrified he was going to fall off the unbalustraded balcony on which he strangled Desdemona. I thought of reminding him of the terror he had aroused in me, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to sound petty.

The Chandler Protocol

I have always been guided by the sentiment of Raymond Chandler as expressed in a letter to Jamie Hamilton, his British publisher in 1951:

Publishers may apologize to authors and to

other publishers and to other writers. But with

agents it is enough that you let them live.

I am, however, prepared to make an exception for veteran agent Peter Buckman who has returned to the novel after a brief hiatus as a publisher, a non-fiction author and a television scriptwriter, with the first in a projected series of cosy crime stories by-lined the Pumpernickel Mysteries.

Pumpernickel is a black poodle belonging to Soho solicitor Leo Wengrowski, still active (in more ways than one) and working beyond retirement age, and so doesn’t get too many of the really good lines handed out by Buckman. In particular, I like the world view of Dennis Arbuthnot the self-styled ‘world’s most fearless reporter’ who, when told of the numerous additives listed on the label of the wine he is quaffing, he retorts: Which is precisely why I don’t read them. There is enough bad fiction in the world without adding wine labels.

Dead Early [Word of Mouth Books], which is great fun, begins with a suspicious suicide pact and a fatal shooting, all of which involves members of a local Golf Club. As Mr Pink in Reservoir Dogs might have said: so, no real people then?

To preorder from Amazon, click on this link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DXVP4PNP https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DXVP4PNP

Cheaper than Easter eggs, probably better for you, and just as much fun!