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(“I only dress up for people like you.”) For London visits, he has a small flat in Westminster and a chronic Harvey Nicks habit. “I always go to the sales, being a poor, humble freelance these days It’s marvellous going to Harvey Nichols. There are one or two people there, in their early 20s, who know me. Be true to yourself.’ And the moment I took that decision, everything took off on a scale that was mind-blowing. Beatrix Miller, then editor of Vogue, sent Cecil Beaton to photograph me, looking like a frightened schoolchild against this Elizabethan picture of corrupt grandees.”These days, he is more likely to be found in The Laskett, his beloved 19th-century Herefordshire rectory, than anywhere else, weeding its three- acre garden, casually, if unimaginably, attired in a pair of jeans and an old teeshirt. I did that for three months and then I thought ‘Look – they’ve appointed you for what you are Who are you kidding? You love dressing up.

When did he realise he’d crossed over? “The time came at the Gallery when I decided to divide my wardrobe in two, wear safe, directorial suits by day and save all my fripperies for the evening. He never intended to flee England (“It’s been just an accident, really”) but he married a Finnish woman and lived in Helsinki, and then moved to Umbria, Italy, because England looked too pricey. He is the first Unsworth not to have gone down the Durham mines – his father went underground when he was 13 – and he is a devotee (from afar) of the English landscape, “but living in Italy as I do,” he says.”We’re happy there, very happy – maybe too happy But I do sometimes feel too far from everything. He met Francis Bacon only once, on the Circle Lind (“He complained about Kenneth Clark referring to his portraits as looking like offal”) and thought Ossie Clark over-praised: “I last saw him at a Vogue party at the Orangery.

There was this haggard figure who used to be so beautiful and glamorous, and I went home and wrote: ‘The only way this person will be remembered is in that Hockney picture with Celia Birtwell and the cat.’”You have to keep reminding yourself that Roy Strong was at the time an arriviste, a social mountaineer, a boy from Enfield on the make, a class warrior of a sort, rather than the haut-mondaine and drawing-room confidant that he rapidly became. He recalls the time when, dining at the Nigel Lawsons, he was seated between Lady Antonia Fraser and Lady Diana Cooper “and I could see everyone round the table asking ‘Who is that young man, to be placed between two such women?’” It was clearly his finest hour. His conversation, once we hit the Sixties, becomes a fusillade of name-dropping, of dear friends from Peter [Hall] and Trevor [Nunn] to Cecil [Beaton] and the Queen Mum, and every fashion person from Hardy [Amies] and Hartnell [Norman] to Jean Muir. They queued for the Portrait Gallery right round the block to the National, and that taught them a lesson.”Strong’s voice rises to a pitch of triumph.