Independent spirit

It’s possible that my life would have been quite different if I hadn’t met the literary agent Jacintha Alexander at a party in 1985. At the time I was an impoverished researcher and aspirant writer, with a specialism in 20th-century British art. As we chatted of this and that, it emerged that Jacintha had a project that might interest me — working on the memoirs of an artist who’d already written quite a substantial text but needed help to prepare her book for publication. The artist in question was the distinguished surrealist Eileen Agar, and I jumped at the suggestion that I might work with her.

I remember our first meeting, at a group exhibition of English surrealists. Eileen was tiny but immensely chic, wearing black and white and red, with a beret and dark glasses. She was imperious and carried a stick. Desmond Morris, himself a surrealist painter as well as as a popular behaviourist, came and stood over her in his white raincoat in a wonderful display of body language that (on another occasion) I’d have loved to have heard him analyse.