Kingsley Amis, despite earning £822,000 in the last five years of life, died with a relatively modest estate. What he earned, he spent: £315 on taxis, £432 at the Garrick Club, £1,038 on drink — and that just in one month in February 1993.

Amis had a bulldog agent. Others weren’t so lucky. Penelope Fitzgerald’s first novel The Golden Child (1977) was taken on by Duckworth for £200. Was this acceptable?, asked the managing director. “No,” wrote Fitzgerald, “but I haven’t the courage to say no.”

George Gissing, who had painted the hack trade in rough colours in New Grub Street (1891), used to ask of young writers talked up as the next big thing: “But has he starved?”

Better, many writers have concluded, to take on lucrative work for the lowbrow mags despised by literary London, than to starve in the TLS and LRB. Martin Amis and Ian McEwan picked up cheques for short stories in the adult magazines Penthouse and Club International.

Taylor’s admiration for the men and women who have scraped — or raked — a living by their pens springs from every page of this energetic, affectionate, galvanising book. It sends you hurrying to order all the novels, memoirs and collected letters you haven’t read and to re-read the ones you have. May editors commission a sequel, may Hollywood buy the film rights, and may he never flounder in garret despair.