His creativity – fiction, poetry, marvellous graphic art and sculpture – was vast. His gift for earthy, shameless cookery was related to his taste for gut-heaving scenes in his novels (the eels in the dead horse’s head in The Tin Drum provided the yuck of the decade). Vast, too, was his capacity to drink all night and still be funny and affectionate at dawn. Because of him, people are more ready to hear what they don’t want to hear. But whose voice will say it now? As Green used to tell crowds: “The citizen’s first duty is not to keep quiet.”
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