For many years Michele Hanson lived in a huge flat in Holland Park, west London, owned by the film director Michael Winner, which she called the Penthouse. I went to share this with her just before the birth of her daughter, Amy.
Each day I brought back snippets of information from the world of publishing acquired through my job as an editor at Penguin Books in Kings Road, which Michele crafted into her “bits” of prose, as she called them. These would then be read to me totally transformed, unrecognisable and brilliantly funny – forerunners of her columns.
Her aim at first seemed not so much publication as collaborative pleasure, and her models were centred around the 18th century: Swift’s A Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels; Lord Hervey’s Memoirs, which she would read out with wild gesticulation over dinner; Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy from the previous century; and Hazlitt from the succeeding one. Gradually, pieces began to appear in Vogue and in the literary magazine Bananas.
Michele’s journalistic instincts were unerring. When in 2011 Brent council announced the closure of 50% of the borough’s libraries it was to her I first turned, and in a column she denounced the move in characteristic terms – “What do you want? Libraries all over the bloody place?”
Brilliant and fearless, she would “rail at, downright” the things she abhorred, and we her readers and friends revelled in her so doing.
