My Negroni-soaked lunch with Laurence Olivier

Breakfast is my preferred meal, in case you’re interested. I broke my fast this week with my walking laser-light of a friend, William Shawcross, at Fischer’s in Marylebone, which serves an egg rosti to rival that of Café Sacher in Vienna. Fischer’s consists of a small entrance area, a bar to the left, and at the rear a faux Austrian dining room with wall-to-wall antlers (synthetic, but that’s how the strudel crumbles these days). The main room forms a St Helena to which second class patrons are exiled. Preferred clients, selected with unerring snobisme, are placed at the front.

We, of course, were allotted an impeccable position by the window. The Tudors used to breakfast on cheese and small ale, which brought us to the new series of Wolf Hall, which is to air on the BBC. This bears upon me harshly. The television adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novels was like a religion with no dilution of agnosticism, as were the books, which were vastly overrated. Mantel wrote like a Teuton. Indeed, novelising to her was as solemn a business as trimming a beard is to a German barber. She blasted her way through her interminable works. Her writing, one feels, often took on the character of a siege operation, with tunnelling, drum fire, assaults in close order and hand-to-hand fighting. She was the Hindenburg of the historical novel and the adaptation was worse.

Mark Rylance, who will reprise his role as Thomas Cromwell, had the permanent and tedious aspect of a minor clerk trying to bring a village under the yoke and taking a laborious inventory of the inhabitants. His acting is the very negation of lightness, intuition and impressionism and I could never fathom why he became a word-of-mouth myth.