I remember how delighted I was when Michael accepted one of my first reviews for PNR, a mediocre piece as I remember it, on Muriel Spark’s Collected Stories.

I remember one of the first times I met Michael in person, at a launch of my Dante’s Inferno at the London Review Bookshop. He introduced me as ‘one of my least original authors’.

I remember when Dante’s Inferno received a Society of Authors’ Travelling Scholarship, Michael ribbing Neil Astley about the state of his shoes at the awards ceremony.

I remember at the Carcanet at Fifty celebration at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich, several Carcanet poets describing how Michael had meticulously edited their first books, and saying that I’d never had even a comma changed in mine.

I remember spending the evening with Michael and Jazmine, and that I suggested to Michael that PNR ran a Supplement on Oulipo to celebrate their sixtieth anniversary, and that it came out the next year, on their sixty-first anniversary.

I remember the poet Simon Smith telling me he had met Michael to discuss his Catullus translations in Manchester, and that Michael had shown him the manuscript of my Shakespeare’s Sonnets, saying: ‘What do you make of that?’

I remember at the Goldsmiths’ launch of my version of the Epic of Gilgamesh – Dictator – alongside Jenny Lewis, that Michael embarrassed me by reading the most explicit scene, in front of Blake Morrison, where Enkidu is seduced by Shamhat.

I remember ...