The sage at the wheel

The late Leonard Setright was a rightly admired, genuinely idio- syncratic, provocatively pedantic and engagingly discursive motoring writer who loved any excuse to show off his Latin or to get Milton, Mozart or Ecclesiastes into a car column. He relished his reputation for having been quoted more often than anyone else in Private Eye’s Pseuds’ Corner, was obsessive about tyres, drove very fast, wrote the best book there will ever be on the Bristol (Palawan Press) and one of the best books there will ever be on the social history of motoring (Drive on!, Granta). This, his last, is an unfinished memoir, ranging from his first bicycle, through the legal profession, National Service and test-driving heavy lorries to the launch of the Citroën CX Turbo.

He has been called the Wittgenstein of the motoring press, but he was not quite that; for one thing, Wittgenstein was a trained engineer, whereas Setright was not.