In September 1985, when I visited the Hospital of the Blue Nuns in Rome to see the room in which Martin Boyd died, I never thought to check the height of the windows, nor to cross-examine the calm and affable Sister Raphael Myers, with whom I looked at Boyd’s last view of the city. If anything was fully documented in my biography (Martin Boyd: A Life, 1988) it was his final illness and death.

It was midday, so my diary reminds me: the only time when the room would be empty before the next admission. The hospital was a cool, quiet place, air-conditioned, I think, with windows closed against Rome’s heat. Sister Raphael remembered Boyd, but she hadn’t been on duty when he died. She could tell me nothing that I didn’t already know from Boyd’s diaries or from the testimony of the friends who had visited him. ‘A difficult patient?’ ‘All patients are a little difficult; one expects that.’ I went on to lunch in the Borghese Gardens, feeling that I had done a biographer’s duty on my last day in Rome.