Dame Antonia Byatt, the novelist A.S. Byatt, has died after a long illness. With her goes part of the conscience of English fiction; its heart, its power to think, its capacity for feeling both wild and exact. She was one of the most generous people I ever knew.
One of the things you had to accept if you were a friend of Antonia’s was that she was interested in a lot of things that you knew nothing about. One of these, in my case, was sport. One day I dropped in on her in her house in Putney, and found her glued to the TV, bright, almost gleeful with attentiveness. I am so uninterested in any sport I can’t remember whether it was snooker or tennis, but I sat down and, when it seemed to be hitting a hiatus, mildly wondered what it was, exactly, about…
I experienced the privilege of her fond gaze and her warm, rigorous offers of ideas – more than I deserved
Antonia was amused.
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