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Why? “The British always want to stick you into a niche and nail you there. I was being nailed as a gardening writer, and while I adore that, I am a historian with other interests.” Was the intention educative? “I have become appalled by the tide of ignorance I see around me. Things I took for granted that everybody knew – you can’t just assume anything any more. Strong’s horticultural advice has sold over half a million copies in six languages.

Now he is reverting to his early academic days as a historian, and next week will publish The Story of Britain, a headlong gallop from Boudicca to Thatcher in 600 pages. Sir Roy is not un-rude himself, however, interrupting unwelcome questions with a bark of “What?”. The safest course is to keep the subject on or near clothing and the royal family; he virtually squirms with delight when talking about both.A seemingly lifelong career as a museum director (he spent six years at the National Portrait Gallery, before the V&A) gave way in 1987 to a second career as a gardening expert. To the visiting interviewer, he’s gossipy, tremblingly fastidious and rather a crosspatch.

When I got one or two details of his CV wrong, it was treated as a grotesque social solecism. To passers-by in the street, he is a harmless old buffer; to academic historians he is at best a populist, at worst a charlatan; to gender analysts he’s a puzzlingly camp heterosexual (happily married for 25 years to Julia Trevelyan Oman, the theatre designer); to gardeners he’s a godsend; to his former staff at the Victoria and Albert Museum (of which he was director for 14 years) he was a chilly martinet; to the Queen Mother he’s an affable dinner companion; to AN Wilson, who wrote a gushing encomium in the Evening Standard the other day, he’s a kind of national monument (“part of Our Island Story”) who will be admired forever. It’s a strong look: to me he resembles a pedigree Saluki with a PhD and a migraine, though I can see the force of the Bonfire- Night-guy-from-Harrods description favoured elsewhere.
Opinions of Sir Roy have always differed and still do. “I should be perfectly happy if I never spoke to him again,” he says with finality.

Sir Roy is looking very dressy today in a grey check, double-breasted, Nicole Farhi suit-type creation with touches of pink in it, and an almost- matching tie from English Eccentrics. Tan loafers complete the ensemble – that’s unless you also count the mane of platinum-straw hair, the eyeball- distending professorial specs and the volcanic moustache which Nietschze himself might have envied. And as for having tulips on the table in August…” Would this be anything to do with his long-running feud with Sir Terence, who once suggested that Strong should be “stuffed and exhibited in a case at the V&A”? A look of distaste suffuses his features. Sir Roy Strong, the ageing Clovis of post-war London, is seated for lunch in Butler’s Wharf Chop House, one of Sir Terence Conran’s restaurants by Tower Bridge, similarly engaged in regretting the tableware. “I’ve been trying to see what’s wrong with this place,” he says “I think it’s all this wood-on-wood effect A few simple white cotton cloths… Saki, the Edwardian satirist, used to write stories about a languid young fellow called Clovis who frequented the drawing rooms and weekend house-parties of the aristocracy, uttering barbed little mots and “trying to forgive the furniture”. In Greece, the past is all around you, but there is also this strong sense of loss.

But here – I mean, in Umbria – the total humanisation of the landscape is inescapable. Everything is still going on.” At one point in the novel, someone hacks some ivy off a tree by severing the root But he knows that the scars on the trunk will never fade.. It is not ironic that there are snakes in arcadia: what else would you expect? “The real thief of dreams,” the tricky lawyer reflects at the end, “was generally not the one you feared but the one you trusted.” In a very deft way, Unsworth has peeked behind the manners of a 2000-year-old civilisation and found the same fierce rivalries and mean spirals that have been causing trouble in these parts for centuries “It’s such a strong feeling,” he says “I’ve had it nowhere else. It can be delayed for a long time, for 40 years, but it’s a killer when it does come.