The world of Auberon Waugh

Looking forward to reading Kiss Me, Chudleigh: the World According to Auberon Waugh edited by William Cook.

I've been catching up on some of the reviews in the New Statesman and elsewhere and they have reminded me why Waugh was my favourite journalist when I was a student in the late Seventies and he had regular columns in The Spectator and Private Eye.

I have written before about how thrilled I was to meet him, shortly after I became director of Forest, and how he persuaded me (although I didn't need much persuading) to sponsor a series of rather louche drinks parties at The Academy Club (which he founded) in Lexington Street, Soho.

Furnished with wooden tables and chairs and the smallest bar you ever saw, the Academy Club consisted of a single room which Dickens would have recognised. During our parties it would be thick with tobacco smoke and it was no coincidence that the most popular seats were the ones next to the open sash windows!

Bron would invite contributors to the Literary Review (which he edited), Forest would invite some of our contacts, and one or two guests would simply appear. As a result journalists and authors would mingle with politicians, campaigners and out-of-work actresses in what I can only describe as a den of hedonism, though perhaps my memory is playing tricks.

What I do recall very well is meeting Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas and we have remained friends ever since.

Sadly Bron died in January 2001 and it was only then that I discovered that he had lived for 40 years with just one lung, having lost the other as a result of an accident during National Service.

Following his funeral on January 24, 2001, the Telegraph obituary noted:

At the end of the service a retiring collection was taken for the Howard League for Penal Reform, one of Waugh's favourite charities, although his family said that they had considered giving it to Forest, the pro-smoking organisation which the satirist had long supported.