It must have been in 1963 that I first met Nick Jacobs. I was a teenager growing up in East Berlin, with a group of close friends who usually met and had frequent parties at the house of my oldest friend, Babu Honigmann. One day her mother had a visitor from the West, he was the friend of a close friend of hers in London, where she had lived during the war. (The friend of hers, I later found out, was Ilona Donath, who married Wolf Suschitzky.)

To us teenagers he was an interesting intellectual, an attractive bachelor who had studied German language and literature in West Germany, but now had returned to London and worked at Penguins. How romantic!

A few years later I visited London, and looked him up. He had a ground floor bedsit in one of those large houses in Belsize Park, just up from Swiss Cottage. I remember a generous friendly room with large windows and wall-to-wall light-coloured carpet, tall bookcases. To me all incredibly glamorous and intriguing. I sat on the carpet leafing through a few of his books. I had mentioned to him that I was about to study architecture, so he gave me three or four Pelican books on architecture (which I still have, of course), and took me out for lunch to a small Greek café nearby. My first avocado and moussaka: exotic food not dreamed of in East Berlin.

Later I moved to London myself, and saw him infrequently but regularly. It was not easy to stay in touch with him because he was often busy, but also disappeared at times, usually during the winter it seems. However he always seemed happy to hear from me, so we stayed in touch for the following forty or fifty years.