It was Clay Felker, the editor of New York magazine, who introduced me to Tom Wolfe. This was at the beginning of the Seventies, the magazine that Felker and Milton Glaser had conjured from the supplement to the defunct New York Herald Tribune was throwing off energy like a cyclotron and Wolfe was one of its marquee names. We hit it off.  He was at once as mannerly and as Out There as one of his white suits. I vividly recall walking with him through a party, I’m pretty sure at Harper’s Magazine, certainly at a time when the bruises left by Radical Chic, his skewering of a party given by the conductor Leonard Bernstein for the Black Panthers, were still throbbing. Felker told me exultantly that one of the principal weapons in Wolfe’s armory was ‘mockery’ and at the Harper’s party I sensed waves of energy in the crowd, by no means entirely positive, but Wolfe was ever courteous, absolutely not puffed up by the self-regard of, say, a TV talking head, just an alert observer, and imperturbably bullet-proof.

I was still living in London but I was in and out of New York a fair amount and would spend frequent evenings with Wolfe, mostly in his apartment, growing familiar with such elements as the punchbag, that he indicated he sometimes used to keep in shape, the portrait by Richard Merkin, an artist/illustrator and a fellow dandy, and putting away – me, not Wolfe – much too much red wine.

I saw quite a bit of Wolfe when he came to London, wrote a profile of him for the Brit glossy, Harper’s Queen, took him around somewhat and suggested he might find interesting raw material........

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