Raphael is, of course, a compulsive aphorist. ‘Men remarry not to get new wives but to become new husbands.’ Sometimes his prose is so dense you wish you had a scythe handy. ‘Scholarship the spine that keeps him together, he is vertebrate with publications. His new book, on Propertius, bristling with bromides, requires a reader sufficiently dated to be scandalised by the no longer scandalous.’ He reminds me a little of Michael Bywater, another man whose mind seems to work more quickly than his ability to write it all down. Also, in his wordplay, of Clive James, although, being notoriously thin-skinned, he has no time for James, who is rude about Raphael’s TV programmes in the Observer. ‘Who is Clive James? I believe he has a beard; or once had one. He is, I think, Australian.’ Elsewhere he quotes Jonathan Miller’s comment to Tom Conti (who played the Raphael-like character in The Glittering Prizes): ‘You only missed one thing in your portrayal of Freddie: the pirhana-like ferocity of the man when crossed.’

His cahiers make no concession to anyone, least of all the reader, who might sometimes pray for a footnote or two. Raphael is not long on modesty, false or otherwise: you suspect that his ego, if not tethered with strong ropes, would float away over the horizon. But he is also the perfect unreliable narrator: bilious, vulnerable, chippy, bitchy, hypersensitive and brilliantly funny and inventive, with at least three or four outstandingly good jokes a page. Buy it and tell everyone you know to buy it, so we can have volume five in a couple of years’ time. 

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