Henry Fairlie was good company too, though very far from innocent, and with nothing angelic about him except his deceptive smile. I wish Charles Lamb had been around to encapsulate him. He spent his life perched on a tottering tripod formed by women, drink and debt, occasionally falling off but scrambling back with astonishing agility until, in the end, it was all too much. When I first came across him, he had just emerged from a brief spell in Brixton, where an angry judge had put him for contempt of court by breaking a bankruptcy order. His much-tried wife, Lisette, memorably summed up this episode: "Well, at least I know where Henry is." I can still hear her calling out despairingly: "Henerey!" He always kept his money in cash in his top pocket, and when this was full he was liable to disappear, on a tour of girlfriends. He specialised in seducing young, pretty, lower-middle-class housewives, whose husbands — commercial travellers, oil explorers, airline pilots, etc — were away a lot. It was Henry's boast: "I can get a hot cooked supper all over North London."

He sometimes contemplated, in his cups, more permanent escapades. It was one of his accomplishments to get so drunk that he remembered nothing of the night the next morning, yet appeared at the time perfectly sober, except to those who knew him really well. 

A beautiful woman, the wife of a rapidly rising politician, told me that Henry had once proposed to her, during a carousal, to run away with him. "This kind of furtive intrigue is unworthy of us both," he declared grandly. "We must regularise it." Enraptured, almost unable to believe her delighted ears, the lady said: "Henry, are you serious?" "Never was more serious in my life." He told her that, as a start, they must go to Paris together. He would get the tickets. She was to pack a little bag and meet him the next day in the Rivoli Bar at the Ritz, at 6.30pm. So off he went, and the next day, with no recollection whatever of the conversation, Henry went about his normal business. The lady packed her bag, left a farewell note to hubby on the mantelpiece, and was duly in the Rivoli Bar at 6.30. No Henry. Six forty-five, still no Henry. Seven, and quarter past, no Henry. She asked the barman. "Mr Fairlie, Madam? No, haven't seen him for some time." At 7.30, she realised with dread that he was not coming, and taxied home in panic, just in time to snatch the note and tear it up, as she heard her husband's latch-key in the front door. What an escape!

Henry prospered for some time with the Daily Mail, that most generous of newspapers. Told to cover the Paris Summit in 1960, he was given by the cashier a thick wodge of newly printed notes known in the trade as a Goldbrick. That duly went into the top pocket, and Henry was unable to resist a tour of North London housewives. So he never got to Paris and the Mail sacked him. He then turned to America, and wrote some splendid pieces there in Washington, oscillating between New York and London. During a brief visit to home pastures, he took part in a then-popular evening chat-show, Three After Six, and rashly libelled a popular woman writer. She sued, the TV company coughed up, but Henry never troubled to answer any of the lawyers' letters he received. Instead, he returned to America. When the case came to court, for approval of the settlement reached, Henry was nowhere to be found, and the judge became angry. He concluded his remarks: "As for the contumacious co-defendant, who I understand is in foreign parts, I must point out, that if he ever comes within the authority of this court, it will be at his peril." These deadly words in due course reached Fairlie in America, and he took them very seriously indeed, never returning to England — even after the affair had been forgotten, and the judge died. 

Inevitably, he fell on hard times in America too, and ended up sleeping on a couch in the office of the New Republic. This book is a glorious memorial, delighting his fast-dwindling band of friends, and introducing him, I trust, to a new circle of younger readers. I wish one could be sure that, among them, there are two such clever writers as Frank and Henry, as funny as the first, and such a rich source of anecdotage as the second.