I’m sad to read of the death of John Richardson, aged 95, older than I thought, whose grandfather, rather amazingly, was born in 1817, in the reign of George III. One of his many remarkable characteristics was that, although he had written short books in the 1950s, including one on Braque for Penguin Modern Painters and a book on Picasso’s watercolours in 1956, he was already 67 by the time that the first volume of his magisterial four-volume biography of Picasso (one still to appear) was published and was still going strong writing, publishing and organising major exhibitions on Picasso for Larry Gagosian well into his eighties. A lesson to us all.