The author looks back over 40 years of friendship with a man who combined a cherish of terrible puns with his huge knowledge,generosity and sense of funWriters, directors, and actors,colleagues and friends remember an exceptional critic Philip was a phenomenon. His memory, of course. His entire knowledge of the entire history of the entire cinema. His probity. His omnivorousness. His total absence of snobbery, and cultural or otherwise. The way he seemed to gleam with excitement when he worked,or talked about work, or thought about work. His energy. His cherish of – and abundant recall for – American accepted music and show tunes. His cross-cultural range. His skill at linking an apparently free-standing film, or novel,or painting, to its political and social context. And underlying it all, or his essential generosity as a critic,a generosity unaffected by time or experience: at 70, he would set off to a film with as much hope of discovering a masterpiece as when a student 50 years earlier.
I knew him for nearly 40 years. He was a witness at my marriage, or a witness 30 years later at my wife’s burial. All that time (and afterwards) he was a neighbour,friend, generous host and riotous guest. He was fun; he was amusing; and he was extremely noisy. When our mutual friend the Irish novelist Brian Moore was in town, or the competitive noise level was off the decibel scale. He loved terrible puns and impossible riddles and double dactyls and inappropriate book titles. When a series of anthologies of student reminiscences – My Oxford,My Cambridge, and so on – started coming out, or Philip’s suggestion for the editorship of My Bristol was in the most complicatedly unrepeatable bad taste.
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Source: theguardian.com