Time spent recollecting the little Bohemia we foregathered in several tryout places before settling on a villainous Turkish-Cypriot kebab house on the fringes of Bloomsbury called the Bursa—sharing cheap kebabs and hummus and retsina and dividing up a bill that never quite seemed to reflect the low value of the nosh—confirms three related but contrasting things for me. The first was the pervasive cultural influence of Philip Larkin. The second was the importance of word games and the long, exhaustive process that makes them both live and become worthwhile. The third was the gradual but ineluctable rise of Margaret Thatcher and her transatlantic counterpart Ronald Reagan. These, then, will be my excuses and pretexts while I “let in daylight upon magic,” as the essayist Walter Bagehot phrased it.

In a New Statesman piece, I said in passing that I thought Mrs. Thatcher was surprisingly sexy.

Unspoken in our circle was quite a deep divide between left and, if not exactly right, yet increasingly anti-left. Fenton and I were still quite Marxist in our own way, even if our cohort was of the heterodox type that I tried to describe earlier. Kingsley had become increasingly vocally right-wing, it often seeming to outsiders that he was confusing the state of the country with the condition of his own liver (but please see his letters of the time to notice how cogent he often still was). Clive and Martin had been hugely impressed—as who indeed had not?—by the emergence of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as a moral and historical titan witnessing for truth against the state-sponsored lie. In between, men like Terry and Mark found it difficult to repudiate their dislike for a Tory Party that had been the main enemy in their youth. Robert Conquest was and still is the most distinguished and authoritative anti-Communist (and ex-Communist) writing in English, but if this subject was excluded, his politics tended toward something fairly equably social democratic in temper. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he and I agreed that the Moscow Olympics should be boycotted, and of course it was he who noticed that an aquatic event was being held in one of the Baltic States, the Russian annexation of which had never been recognized by the post-Yalta agreements that defined the Cold War. At the last Friday lunch I ever attended, before emigrating to the United States, in 1981, a toast was raised to Bob's impending fourth—or was it fifth?—marriage. “Well,” he replied modestly, “I thought perhaps ‘one for the road.’” Philip Larkin wrote gloomily to Kingsley that the new Texan spouse would probably make their old friend move permanently to America, “as all Yank bags do.” And so indeed it proved. Elizabeth—or “Liddie”—is a bit more than “the other half”: she is a great scholar in her own person and the anchor of one of the most successful late marriages on record. Once Martin and I had also married Americans, she printed a T-shirt for all concerned that read, YANK BAGS CLUB.

I learned appreciably from registering the cross-currents that underlay this apparently light but really quite serious lunch. Our common admiration for Larkin, as a poet if not as a man, arose from the bleak honesty with which he confronted the fucked-up—the expression must be allowed—condition of the country in those years. It was his use of that phrase—“They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” as the opening line of his masterly “This Be the Verse”—that put him outside the pale of the “family values” community.

Clive James was in some ways the chief whip of the lunch and would often ring round to make sure that there was a quorum (though I noticed that whenever Martin was away his enthusiasm waned a bit, as did everyone else's). He needed an audience and damn well deserved one. His authority with the hyperbolic metaphor is, I think, unchallenged. Arnold Schwarzenegger resembled “a brown condom full of walnuts.” Of an encounter with some bore with famous halitosis Clive once announced, “By this time his breath was undoing my tie.” I well remember the day in 1978 when he delivered his review of a biography of Leonid Brezhnev to the New Statesman and Martin read its opening paragraphs out loud: “Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.” One could hear his twanging marsupial tones in his scorn for this world-class drone and bully (the work was being “published” by the ever servile and mercenary tycoon Robert Maxwell, one of the Labour Party's many sources of shame). Clive had given up alcohol after a long period of enjoying a master-servant relationship with it, in which unfortunately the role of the booze had been played by Dirk Bogarde. He thus threw in money only for the food part of the bill, until one day he noticed how much the restaurant charged for awful muck such as bitter lemon and tonic water. At this he moaned with theatrical remorse, “I owe you all several hundred pounds!” But not all was geniality and verve: the only rift in the Friday fraternity came when Clive took huge exception to Fenton's Sunday Times review of his (actually quite bad) 1981 verse play about the rise of Prince Charles. The expression complained of, I seem to recall, was “This is the worst poem of the twentieth century.” The ensuing chill went on for a bit.