The warm, generous and highly cerebral two-page obituary in The Times on the Oxford philosopher Sir Michael Dummett inspired a moving and unusual tribute to him some days later on the newspaper’s letters page. Jan Cuomo, from Orpington in Kent, who was previously unaware of Dummett’s achievements as Oxford’s Wykeham Professor of Logic and a stalwart fighter for racial equality, said the article showed “how one person can earn such respect and fondness that it shines out of the paper and makes one want to learn more about the logic and the man”.

I feel privileged to have met Prof Dummett during a couple of longish, interviews at his home in Park Town in the early 1990s. The first was in 1993, when he sat for Antony Moore’s excellent portrait (above). My article concerned the publication by Duckworth of Grammar and Style, his invaluable reference book intended, as its subtitle put it, “for examination candidates and others”. As an ‘other’, I have often referred to it in the years since.

Towards the end of the book is eloquently expressed our duty towards languages. Dummett writes: “They are marvellous instruments for the communication and expression of thought and feeling, and vehicles for private thought. Each generation makes changes in them, but all have the responsibility for handing them on to the next generation in at least as perfect a condition as that in which they themselves inherited them.”

This is an idea as unfashionable (to some at least) as Dummett’s attitude to nicotine. The Times obituary referred to his “heroic smoking . . . pursued with a cavalier disregard for petty regulation”. It was this that I remember best about our first interview. As one only recently released myself from slavery to tobacco, I marvelled at the rapidity with which one Silk Cut was followed by another.