I was in Dublin at the weekend and naturally taking advantage of some of the many excellent bars for which it is famed.

The guide book amused me with the remark that there were very few of them where playwright Brendan Behan had not been thought a regular.

Though he was by no means a toper on the same legendary scale, something similar could be said of my old friend, the late poet and novelist John Wain, in respect of Oxford.

Dave Richardson’s new pub book contains an excellent photograph of him, with landlord Dave Kyffin, in the back bar of The King’s Arms, where a hand-written poem by him hangs on the way, along with his picture.

I recall many happy hours there with him, the conversation often turning to his fellow writers. He spoke most affectionately of Seamus Heaney, his successor as Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, and his college contemporary Philip Larkin (which he probably wouldn’t have done had he known of the bitchy things being said about him in Larkin’s correspondence with a third St John’s man, Kingsley Amis).

But John also patronised many other pubs, including The Eagle and Child, where he had figured in Inklings gatherings with CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, the nearby Royal Oak and his village local, The Plough, in Wolvercote, where I enjoyed a glass of wine with him a day or so before his death in May 1994.

A particular favourite was The Waterman’s Arms, in Osney (now The Punter) to whom he bequeathed not a poem but a whole novel, or rather three of them.

The trilogy Where the Rivers Meet features the pub thinly disguised as The Bargeman’s Arms.

“The Bargeman’s offered, in addition to beer,” he wrote in the first, “two items only of solid food: cheese sandwiches and pickled onions.”

If he could see its gourmet offerings of today...