He once told us on the arts desk of what had happened when he rang one of his publishers. "You aren't by any chance Red Adair," asked a secretary to whom his name clearly meant nothing. "No," he snapped back, "I'm unread Adair."
After I'd shared that on Bluesky, I dug out his book Myths & Memories, a collection of essays about and memories of British culture.
In one of the essays, 'Derrida Didn't Come', he writes about a conference at the Institute of Contemporary Arts that made an uneasy attempt to come to terms with literary theory:
The third tactic, and undoubtedly the most radical, is that, simply, of non-appearance. It has, I venture to suggest, become so axiomatic of these events for the most prestigious guests to fail to arrive that their absence now qualifies as almost an intrinsic part of their experience. Thus, at the ICA, neither Jacques Derrida nor Nathalie Sarraute, the two stars of the seminar, 'disappointed' our expectations, if one may so phrase it, by making an appearance.
Derrida did turn up sometimes. I know that because I once heard him give a paper to a literary conference at Loughborough University. And, thanks to a news story on the university website about an academic who later wrote a play about the occasion, I can tell you that this conference took place in November 2001.
Besides the essays, Adair's book contains 400 random memories of news stories and popular culture from when he was young:
70. I remember reading Nineteen Eighty-four when the year itself seemed to belong to some dim and unknowable future.
192. I remember the Danish musical humorist Victor Borge, each of whose one-man shows seemed a tremendously prestigious affair.
265. I remember Michael Fagin, the intruder who breezed into the Queen's bedroom.
355. I remember Fyfe Robertson.
If I were setting down 400 of my own such memories today, 15 years after his death, I might include:
1. I remember Gilbert Adair
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