Anthony Blunt liked to invent new “special subjects” for third-year undergraduates. One of them was “19th-century art criticism in England and France”. Anita Brookner taught our students about Baudelaire while I was deputed to introduce them to Ruskin and Pater. This was in 1966.
Thus we formed an unlikely friendship. Anita would never enter a pub, but we sometimes had a drink in a little cafe opposite the Archives Nationales in Paris, and she liked lunching in the restaurant at Fenwick’s in Bond Street. A quarter of a trout would fill her.
She was smartly dressed, but in those days often wore ornate dark glasses, used bright red lipstick and chain-smoked tipped Woodbines. Anita often spent the cocktail hour in Blunt’s flat on the top floor of the Courtauld building. As soon as she got home to South Kensington, she told me, she went to bed with piles of empty exercise books in which she wrote novels, in French. So her later public career as a novelist had been given some very personal preparation.
