I learned more about Shakespeare from Peter during our fourteen-year friendship than I did from seven long years studying him at school then university. He seemed to have practically photographic recall not just of the text but also stagings. Within days of our first meeting he was chatting spontaneously about the different versions he had seen of Troilus and Cressida, including one with Max Adrian: ‘I was bowled over – Shakespeare with an axe to grind’. He said that as far as literature was concerned his was ‘the higgeldy-piggeldy of un-self-disciplined self-education’. But he and I knew that this was his secret to having a lifelong love affair with the written and spoken word. A reference to filmed versions of Hamlet had him rooting out the Kozintsev version on YouTube and talking about the choreography of Ophelia’s mad scene. It was like catching the notes from a masterclass. Only a couple of weeks before his death, I happened to mention by the by the actress Denise Coffey, whom it turned out we both admired, and there he was with his razor-sharp recall, extolling her Adriana in The Comedy of Errors at Edinburgh Haymarket Ice Rink in 1971 which he went to see four times. There was no talking for show with Peter, just the eagerness to listen carefully and speak from the heart as well as the head. He was one of the most witty, generous and considerate of people it has been my pleasure and privilege to know.

Steven Cranfield