Lodge was “pretty devastated” when he heard about the Irish writer’s book after finishing his own. He has not read it yet, but will soon, while pondering the flutter in the Zeitgeist that blew in his biographical novel, others by Toibin and Emma Tennant, and Jamesian works by Toby Litt and Alan Hollinghurst. Everything that is causal, that articulates the plot, is historical. Throughout, Lodge sticks to established facts in a virtuoso blend of the truth of biography and the authenticity of fiction. He says that, “I was trying to get the kind of structure that the novelist usually invents – full of metaphors and ironies and contradictions – but to do it with the facts. What’s remarkable is his ability to portray the politics of marriage, for instance, with ever having been married. The Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl: they’re amazing.”Author, Author paints a picture of an urbane mid-career writer, not taking part in the erotic arena, but watching closely from the stands.

For Lodge, “he was, by our standards, a repressed homosexual,” although his novel very deftly treats questions of sex by the lights of his subject’s epoch, not of ours, “but he was a rather repressed person, anyway.” Lodge agrees with the biographer Leon Edel, who “thinks that James never had a physical sexual relationship with anybody… Lodge married his wife Mary, a teacher, in 1959; they have three adult children, a scientist, a solicitor and a much-cherished son with Down syndrome.It all sounds an ocean’s breadth away from James the celibate salon-trotter. Together, as satirists and sages, the “Lodgebury” pair made up a wickedly sharp, double-pronged goad – not least for the traditional Oxbridge literati. Yet, on the basis of carnal-cerebral romps such as Small World and Changing Places, Lodge is still widely pigeonholed as a campus comedian who plays narrative tricks on the sort of randy but crisis-ridden don who yokes classroom theory with bedroom practice.In Birmingham, he also forged a lasting partnership with the late Malcolm Bradbury – a close colleague, and a lifelong friend. He looks like a wreck, as if Jay Gatsby had survived but fallen on long, slow, hard times, so that he ended up not in the mansion on Long Island but in a shabby apartment in Poughkeepsie, struggling to cope on a pension.To which Redford might answer – unfair, inaccurate, and mind your own business. For a start, he is not in danger as a survivor: he has his magnificent property in Utah; he is building a new house in the Napa Valley; he has a New York apartment.

And there are probably more places he can go to, for privacy is crucial to Robert Redford. No matter that he has elected to be that model of naked fame, a movie star: he insists on a degree of privacy that many would regard as irrational, or even stupid You can’t have one without the other, they’d say. To which Redford – calm, but stubborn as rock – would surely say, why not?What may be most important about Redford is being a star while maintaining the status of a man very few know. A close friend and happy co-star, Paul Newman (Butch Cassidy and The Sting, towering hits) admits that he feels he still doesn’t know Redford. Redford has said, flat out, that the thing he most likes about the American open spaces, about the wilderness and Utah, is that you are alone there.