Others saw Ross's profile of the world's most celebrated novelist as devastating, but he resolutely denied being offended by it.

The New Yorker writer Lillian Ross was what was called in her day a "formidable" woman, as much in her unpredictable warmth as in her more famous frost. We became friends late in her life, and only after some difficult passages: on opposite sides of one suite of office politics, we later found ourselves on the same side of another, which helped. More important, we were, for a decade, members of the same gym, which is, for New York writers, the equivalent of Dublin writers being habitués of the same pub. You have to talk to each other. Many of our exchanges took place alongside the treadmill and the Nautilus machines, both of which she used-even though she was by then in her late eighties and nineties-with a genial intensity that didn't preclude conversation. We spoke about writing, reporting, the history of the magazine; we spoke about the peculiar discipline of Talk of the Town stories, which we both loved to write, and about Salinger and Hemingway and others. The other arena of our friendship was Central Park, where, with my children, I often encountered her walking with her adult son, Erik, and would settle down for a conversation while the children played. She was extraordinarily appreciative of children's games and passions, and my daughter recalls her as an inquisitive, mischievous presence.