Ready for take-off

In 1969 John Gross wrote a justly praised book, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. The phrase seemed slightly archaic then, and is more so now. I was going to suggest that Gross is the last Man of Letters, but I find that Stephen Bayley describes me as that in the current issue of GQ magazine — and I’m that bit younger than Gross.

As editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Gross took the brave decision to end back-biting anonymity and give his reviewers by-lines: that was revolutionary, not old-fashioned. If you said he was the best-read man in Britain, I doubt there would be many challengers. Eddie Mirzoeff, who produced the television classic Metro-land with John Betjeman, later made another film with the laureate. The camera whizzed over Britain in a helicopter, and Betjeman approved verse by different poets to accompany each vista. Before the film was screened, Mirzoeff took it along to Gross at the TLS and played it to him.