The second involved the poet Elizabeth Jennings. My fellow biographers have described how their next subject somehow emerged naturally out of the book they were just completing. I’ve never found it to be true before – although some critics tried to make lame jokes out of an imagined connection between my life of Lord Longford and the book that followed it, a biography of the Devil — but in the course of researching and writing about C. Day-Lewis, the former Poet Laureate, I came across his correspondence with Jennings, the only woman alongside Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn and Kingsley Amis among the 1950s Movement poets. There is also an unpublished memoir, recording in stark detail the mental breakdown Jennings had in the 1960s which left her, until her death in 2001, living like a bag lady in Oxford.

How about Elizabeth Jennings, I suggested to my agent and a couple of publishers when the conversation turned to a new project. My agent, to his credit, looked embarrassed and said something about the predilections of the current non-fiction market. The publishers were more brutal in their verdict: just not famous enough. This despite Jennings winning popular awards such as the WH Smith Prize in 1987 for her poetry and her leaving us with several famous/well known/celebrated poems. My own favourite is her sad portrait, in One Flesh, of the elderly couple “Lying apart now, each in a separate bed” whom finally she identifies as her own parents – “Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold.”

It is not, then, achievements that are conspicuously lacking in her case. Or, indeed, a dramatic life. Her life story possesses the same sort of narrative ups and downs that made Shine – Geoffrey Rush’s biopic about the troubled Australian pianist David Helfgott – such a compelling film. No, it is fame in the modern sense that now pollutes every corner of our culture. Without instant and empty name-recognition, you’re just not worth bothering with.