Where to start? PN Review provided my first serious introduction to contemporary poetry two decades ago, when I wouldn’t have believed that my relationship with the magazine, with Carcanet, and with ‘the ebullient Schmidt’ (not my words, but they’ll do) and his colleagues would become the most important of my writing life. Here are two quickfire personal recollections, from a mental stockpile of hundreds, many of which are meaningful because they are personal, and will remain so. All the same, I hope you’ll excuse the self-indulgence.

First: the time he gently encouraged me, in one of my earliest, greenest prose pieces for PN Review, to jab a little harder in a short, barbed essay I’d written on a Very Important Poet – a poet I greatly admired then, and still do. Not long after, at a function attended by my editor, my subject, and (in a lesser capacity) me, Michael slid up to me at the buffet and, tongs in hand, joyously whispered that the victim of my (still gentle) admonishment ‘is not amused’. I have since met the poet in question several times, and on very warm terms, and this little article has never come up. He’ll read this piece, I suspect, and it still won’t get mentioned.

Second: the time I met Michael from a train, before a Carcanet function in Nottingham. ‘I’ve just been reading the most wonderful typescript’, he said, as we galloped down a wet road towards a pub in a cave. ‘Oh, whose?’ He stopped, looked at me. ‘Yours!’ When his edits and suggestions for the collection came, through email, he ...