"Stoppard's Night and Day was dedicated to his friend Paul Johnson, the historian and polemicist. Of the many funerals I have attended in 2023, Paul's was the one I'd least expected to be at. For 25 years, from the late 1970s on, I mocked him in print whenever he wrote anything that seemed to merit it—which, given his prolific and often intemperate output, was very often. He in turn accused me of "playing Job Trotter to [Christopher] Hitchens's Alfred Jingle Esq", a taunt I still cherish. When he threatened to sue unless I stopped goading him, this merely encouraged me to give him another prod. About 20 years ago, however, the fun went out of this sport—perhaps because Paul was well into his seventies, or perhaps because I'd run out of epithets to hurl. Thanks to an intercession by his saintly wife, Marigold, he turned up at a book launch I was hosting, shook me firmly by the hand and agreed an immediate ceasefire. A few years later, he descended into the abyss of Alzheimer's. "The Gospel today had Jesus enjoining us to make peace with our enemies," one of Paul’s children later wrote to me, "and I am sure that you did the right thing by putting an end to your feud with my father while you could.""