A new page in an old friendship

Before we sit an exam, we revise. Before we appear on Any Questions we get ourselves up to speed on the latest news. Before we dine with some grand personage previously unknown to us, we find out about them in Who’s Who. But before we go to stay with a friend we’ve known for more than 20 years, would we expect to read a book on them? A curious assignment; but that has been my task in the first few days of 2011 — and it has proved a moving one.

I first met Allegra Huston in about 1988, when she was an editor at the publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson. We were seated proximately at a lunch party given by the publisher George Weidenfeld (whom I had never met before) in a cavernous Chelsea apartment which was as one imagined the apartment of a senior cardinal in the Vatican might be.