I met him in person once back in the 70s. I was working in a design studio who were producing one of his album covers. I knew who he was, but didn't fully appreciate his true stature back then.

I think the thing that blew me away most when reading his memoirs was how he started collecting the works of then not especially highly rated artists such as Magritte, Picasso, Miro and Freud while still in his early 20s. As someone who, when I read this, had only a couple of years earlier scraped through Art A-level with a thesis on Picasso and a habit of nicking ideas from the surrealists, I was hugely impressed that this man had bought them in original, not bedroom wall poster form.