Grey’s elegy in a Welsh churchyard

One of the first memorable conversations I had with Grey, when we came to know each other nearly 50 years ago, was while we were driving in his rakish BMW coupé to London from Dunstall, his then home in Kent.

He talked spellbindingly about the authorial voice in Henry James’s fiction, and the journey went very fast. The last conversation I had with him, via dictated email, was two weeks before he died; it was about the women in Anthony Trollope’s novels, a more recent passion.

As an aristocratic poet-politician, he himself could have starred in a novel by James or by Trollope; he was also, or Anthony Powell’s , which he loved for its exact appreciation of the human comedy – a gift he shared, in spades.