..Books you really must read. But let us begin with a story.

Twenty years ago, I began a stint as presenter of Radio 4`s Bookshelf. One  afternoon the most beautiful young man I have probably ever seen wandered into the studio with a canvas knapsack on his shoulder. I was interviewing him about his latest novel The Songlines, and his name was Bruce Chatwin. When we had finished, he loped off to catch a train to France and then, he said, probably Africa. I had not made much of The Songlines, but I had made a very great deal of another novel, which is his masterpiece. It is called ON THE BLACK HILL and it takes your breath away. It is the story of twin brothers living on the Welsh/English border in the Black Country, a story of country and farming life as it was, close-knit, hard, much visited by pain and death. Just read the opening page or three. You will not have come across prose like this in years. I suppose the nearest I can come to another writer as good is John McGahern.

But Chatwin did not write another book remotely like On The Black Hill, mainly because he did not write any two books that bore the slightest resemblance to one another.  You could not categorise him or pin him down. He wasa nomad, as a person, as a novelist. I think he did not quite receive his due as a writer because attention was focused on his person - which is how he liked it.

What the ultimate truth about Bruce Chatwin was who can say ? Perhaps there was none. He was a chameleon, who lived not a double but a quadruple, sextuple life. He made up stories about himself and you could not really believe any of them and yet - you did. But I inadvertently penetrated his life at a different point. We then had a small house in Stratford on Avon and when we were there, and I was pushing  the Younger Daughter up College Street in her pram, I often met a charming man who lived in a house higher up, and who always bid us good morning. One day, not long after the Bookshelf interview about The Songlines was broadcast, we met as so often, and he stopped me. "I think I should introduce myself.' he said, " My name is Charles Chatwin."  It was Bruce`s father. He had been a Birmingham solicitor and he was typical of his type and generation. I met his wife later, an elegant woman who had once been very beautiful. But as the parents of the exotic young Bruce, they did not fit - and it occurred to me that it was in order to escape the conventional, ordinary, unremarkable, polite Midlands Middle Class, that he has turned himself into such a colourful, nomadic, many-faceted, rareified character.

We did not meet again until 3 years later. I was sitting in the romantically named Venom clinic at the Churchill Hospital,Oxford, waiting to get my desensitizing injection of which I was having a course. (They didn`t work but that is another story.) And out of a consulting room came a woman pushing a man in a wheelchair, a man so wasted and skeletal and ill that to look at him at all seemed shocking.  He came past me and said 'Stop !'  The woman stopped. He looked at me and started to talk about how he had been spending days in London buying beautiful objects, 'The most beautiful, beautiful things you have ever seen.'  It came out as a slightly fevered babble, but exotic, as beautifully phrased as ever, studded with extraordinary words.

It was, of course, Bruce Chatwin, in his last weeks dying of Aids. He never admitted as much of course. To die of Aids, as such a lot of men were then doing, would have been too common and unremarkable for him -and besides, it carried a pretty strong stigma. He had put it around that he was dying of a rare disease caught from eating an ancient egg in some exotic part of China. There were other stories. But I knew he must have AIDS because this, next door to the Venom Clinic, was the Aids ward.

The sight of his beauty so ravaged and destroyed, was terrible. It seemed the stuff of Greek Tragedy.

I never saw him again and I realised, after they had left, that he had totally failed to introduce me to the woman pushing his chair, and who I vaguely assumed was a helper but who I later learned was his long-suffering wife.

I met his parents quite often though, in the old way, walking up the street. They were always the same. After a while, Charles had to take to a mobility scooter, which he chugged along the pavement. He always stopped, we spoke of this and that - and of Bruce, of whom they were so inordinately proud, in a puzzled sort of way.

I suppose that went for most people.

Read ON THE BLACK HILL. It is a mighty novel. There is no book quite like it, though it owes something to Francis Kilvert, another walker among the Black Hills, another rather isolated, and ultimately sad figure. But you can get the measure of Kilvert. Bruce Chatwin was like quicksilver, a rainbow with a dark underside, a mercurial character who glittered and sparkled. And about whom the line 'Brightness falls from the air' might well have been written.