OTHERS HAVE SAID IT BEFORE ME, I know, but I make so bold as to offer: God bless Beryl Bainbridge. Alas, owing to copyright restrictions, you can't “Listen Again” to her Desert Island Discs, broadcast last week, and so all I can do is make you very very cross if you didn't catch it by telling you how very very splendid it was. Where would we be without Beryl?

I was chopping cabbage as she introduced her seventh musical choice, though I was still reeling from her sixth, Rolf Harris singing Two Little Boys. I'd just about recovered my composure when she announced - in her beautiful voice, which contains her Liverpool origins, her training as an actress and the essence of a million cigarettes past - that her next selection, Kirsty, would be Meat Loaf singing Bat Out of Hell.

I dropped my knife, I really did. I was lucky I didn't do myself an injury. It got better and better, with Kirsty sounding aghast as Dame Beryl said she thought that men were much better at things, at least so it had seemed to her. She spoke gently of how her publisher, Colin Haycraft at Duckworth, had guided her for years; and how only after his death did she feel she had the freedom to write the sequence of remarkable historical novels - The Birthday Boys, Every Man For Himself, Master Georgie, According to Queenie - that have so delighted and amazed her readers in recent years. Colin, she said, would probably have thought she wasn't up to the job. She didn't sound in the least bothered.

The proof of the pudding, they say, is in the eating. I suppose one could become agitated at the thought of Dame Beryl failing to man (if you'll forgive the pun) the feminist barricades, but then she has just got on with it, hasn't she? Year after year, decade after decade, producing the most miraculous fiction that is as clear-eyed and original as she herself was on her desert island. Fiction, it's worth remarking, that often paints the male psyche in fairly stark colours, as her characters stumble off to the Antarctic, or off to war, or find themselves on the icy Atlantic one April night in 1912.

Hurrah for you, Beryl - a real literary heroine for every generation. Her luxury, of course, was a simple one: lots of pens and lots of paper. I'd be the one - and not me alone, I suspect - paddling a coracle to rescue the fruits of her miraculous industry.

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