Now here’s an interview I’d like to hear. Waugh being raked over the coals by three ill-tempered BBC types out to get him. Sounds like he holds his own and throws a little sand in their faces to boot.

Waugh was being questioned by Charles Wilmot, Jack Davies and Stephen Black and the exchanges are, to say the least, “sparky”, according to British Library sound archive curator Stephen Cleary. “It’s three interviewers pitched against one subject and they don’t get on terribly well.”

The interview is part of a new CD from the British Library of BBC broadcasts not heard since they were made by Waugh between 1938 and 1963. It did not get off to the best of starts. One interviewer asks: “May I say to begin with that I personally find, reading your books, that you are to me … perhaps the most interesting, amusing, and at the same time depressing person now writing. Do you really feel that there is any future for mankind at all?”

Waugh complains it smacks of the “when did you last stop beating your wife” question.

The general tone does not improve.