7 October 1939 – 24 November 2019
The BBC world affairs editor on the gifted critic, poet and wit who elevated British life with his televisual panache
• Gordon Banks remembered by Peter Shilton
• Read the Observer’s obituaries of 2019 in full
He came into my life in the same way, I imagine, as he came into everyone else’s: with a joke and a certain amount of bounce, but also with a degree of authority that meant you took him seriously, even while you were laughing. “Jesus, what do you do here – put on Wagner?” It was Clive’s, and my, last year at Cambridge University, and I was living in a medieval room with a central wooden pillar which held the ceiling up. It really was like something out of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. I was the editor of the pretentious student magazine Granta, and he’d got a sheaf of papers in his hand which he thrust at me: not aggressively, but certainly not with the timidity that most of us would feel if we offered our poems for publication. In fact, if anyone was timid it was me. Clive was five years older and physically imposing, even though he wasn’t tall.
I said I’d read them later. “No, have a look now.” The top one was called Together, Sleeping Sideways and it started:
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