I have been reading Claire Tomalin’s A Life of My Own:  not just because of its brief account of her time as a Trustee at the National Portrait Gallery and her role in my appointment as Director, but because I have long admired her independence of mind which comes across magnificently from the writing of her autobiography – the lives of her incompatible parents, her time at Dartington Hall and at Newnham College, Cambridge, her relationship with her first husband Nicholas Tomalin, which is described unsparingly, her turn to writing biography, the birth of a disabled son, Tom, the suicide of her daughter, Susanna;  it is all described unpityingly and austerely:  not an easy life, but mostly an admirable one.