My life was in a strange way that summer, the last summer of its kind there was ever to be. I was riding high on sex and self-esteem-it was my time, my belle époque-but all the while with a faint flicker of calamity, like flames around a photograph, something seen out of the corner of the eye. I wasn’t in work-oh, not a tale of hardship, or a victim of recession, not even, I hope, a part of a statistic. I had put myself out of work deliberately, or at least knowingly. I was beckoned on by having too much money, I belonged to that tiny proportion of the populace that indeed owns almost everything. I’d surrendered to the prospect of doing nothing, though it kept me busy enough.

For nearly two years I’d been on the staff of the Cubitt Dictionary of Architecture, a grandiose project afflicted by delay and bad feeling. Its editor was a friend of my Oxford tutor, who was worried at my drifting unopposed into the routine of bars and clubs, saw me swamped with unwholesome leisure, and put in a word-one of those mere suggestions which, touching a nerve of guilt, take the force of a command. And so I had found myself turning up each day at St James’s Square and sitting in a little back office, disguising my hangover as a kind of wincing, aesthetic abstraction, and knocking box-folders of research material into shape.

Volume One was to cover A to D, and I was allowed to work on some of the subjects that interested me most-the Adams, Lord Burlington, Colen Campbell. I edited the essays of repetitive pundits, was sent out to the British Library or Sir John Soane’s Museum to find plans and engravings; smaller subjects I was allowed to write up myself: I turned in an exemplary article on Coade Stone vases.