I learned of the death of Ronald Searle while reading a book graced by one of his elegant cartoons on its cover. This was Roger Lewis’s What Am I Still Doing Here? My Years As Me, which was published last year by Coronet at £20 but which I bought from Waterstones for half that. It is the book I have enjoyed most so far this year, with the exception of Mr Lewis’s Seasonal Suicide Notes, of 2009, which I ordered immediately afterwards, confident I would like it too. It cost me one penny (plus £2.80 post and packing) through Amazon. Can someone explain what seems to me the lunatic economics of this?

Searle, whom his obituaries reveal to have been very picky in his choice of pals, was one of a number of good eggs that literary critic Lewis could call a mate. Others include various people I have met and liked — for instance, Craig Brown, Lynne Truss, Paul Bailey and Gyles Brandreth. This naturally predisposed me towards his books, which are diary style musings in the manner, say, of Simon Gray whose successor as an ongoing supplier of atrabilious comment I hope Lewis will prove to be in years to come.

Appealing, too, is his identification of various dislikes that again tally with mine (most not personally known to him or me). Step forward (among others) Ricky Gervais, Russell Brand, Jeremy Clarkson and Clive James. But isn’t it the badge of every civilised person to loathe that lot?

When he judges it necessary, he puts the boot in with much vigour, and to such comic effect that I would not advise reading the books in the company of someone unlikely to thank you for giving them ‘the good bits’.

A fireside interruption for Rosemarie came, for instance, over Seasonal Suicide Notes’ mention of the late film critic Alexander Walker, who had once sneered at Lewis for being the son of a Welsh butcher: “I was thrilled when the old poof died, I hope crushed by his bouffant hair do.”

Speaking of old poofs — and with no imputations implied in any direction — it was noticeable that the happily married, father-of-two Lewis appears as likely to comment on male pulchritude as female.

There is a discussion of the Confessions... series of 1970s films in What Am I Still Doing Here? Lewis comments on their star: “After nearly 40 years, Robin Askwith still retains a slim sexiness in these films, with lots of shots of his bobbing arse. He has a huge, boyish grin, which almost cuts his head in two, like a sliced watermelon. Whatever happened to laddish Robin Askwith (b. 1950). Does he still make the blood throb?”

As it happens, I can answer both of those questions. He was on stage at the Mill at Sonning a few weeks ago, playing the part of a taxi driver in the Ray Cooney farce Funny Money. That’s him in the picture above, still sporting the hairdo of his heyday. He did not make my blood throb.

On another personal note, Lewis brought back memories for me with his comments (clearly inspired by something he read in the national press) on a funeral in Torquay. The report reminded him, he said, of an England that the two world wars had been fought to preserve.

“The funeral was held,” he wrote, “of 90-year-old Joya Roberts, the widow of General Sir Ouvry Lindfield Roberts and beloved mother of Ouvrielle, Pelham, Hugh, Dennis, Jean, Martin and John.”

The family of the distinguished soldier General Roberts GCB, KBE, DSO will have been known to a good many of my readers, they having lived in Church Way, Iffley, for more than a decade until his death in 1986. As chairman of the appeal committee for Iffley Church, he played a vital role in saving it from the effects of 800 years of erosion.

Of his many children, I knew only his son Hugh, who was well aware, as an undergraduate at Magdalen College in the late 1970s, how unusual it was to have a father already 90 years old.

Lewis was at Magdalen, too; indeed he may even have overlapped with Hugh. But I don’t think he realises that.