Back in the 1970s, when I went up to Katerina Clark’s place in Connecticut for the weekend, I was always a bit on my guard. Katerina was a wonderful and generous friend, but inquisitive. Being young, I had things in my personal life I wanted to hide. A silent tussle went on between us as she did her best to ferret them out (probably knowing from her other sources more or less what they were) and I stone-walled.

I would date our friendship from this time, when I was in New York, working at Columbia University, and Katerina was teaching at Wesleyan in Middleton, CT. But we had already had thirty years of roughly parallel, sometimes interconnecting lives, and always knew about each other’s progress, thanks to the parental grapevine. The parents were Manning and Dymphna Clark and Brian and Dorothy (‘Doff’) Fitzpatrick, both fathers Australian historians, and all four Melbourne University Arts graduates who, in the 1940s, were part of the local left-wing intelligentsia. Katerina and I were born within sixteen days of each other, in Melbourne hospitals just a few miles apart, in June 1941. Both mothers liked to tell the story of how they were still in hospital on the fateful day, June 22, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Dymphna’s story was presumably literally true, while Doff must be forgiven some poetic licence, unless a two-week stay in hospital after a normal delivery was common in the 1940s.