Pat Kavanagh was my agent for 26 years and represented me for every book I have written. She was one of the most feminine people I have ever met, feline in looks and temperament, beautiful, exotic and unique, more like a dancer in style and appearance than an agent.

She loved books and writers. She could be fierce, especially in negotiations in which apparently she was famous for her long and unnerving silences on the telephone - silences into which inexperienced and nervous publishing executives would suddenly find themselves blurting all kinds of offers and concessions.

She took me on when I was 25, and she, and her husband Julian Barnes, became good friends.

She was not given to soft-soaping her authors, and could be as rigorous as any Leavisite in her views of what they produced. She always gave it to you straight.

She hated being written about in the press, and once told me she saw herself as a country doctor or solicitor, preferring to work behind the scenes. She avoided publishers’ lunches and launch parties as far as possible, which naturally only added to her mystique. She loathed Christmas cards, I remember, and would always put them in the bin unopened.

Almost exactly ten years ago, knowing how much I revered George Orwell, she gave me a framed photograph of Orwell that had hung in Arthur Koestler’s study, and which she had salvaged when she had to clear Koestler’s desk after his suicide.

“I feel so strongly and emotionally about it,” she wrote to me. “I want you to have it.” I have treasured it ever since.

Pat was a link with an older, more distinguished, less corporate and less commercial era in British publishing.

I shall miss her shrewd advice, her enthusiasm, her dry humour, her warmth and her beauty. The only consolation in the devastating news of her death is that she retained all these qualities to the end.

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