Last Post is a collection of reminiscences, anecdotes and a settling of old scores by Frederic Raphael in the form of imaginary letters to many of the people who have been part of his long life. You might expect a nonagenarian’s critical faculties to have ‘mellowed by the stealing hours of time’, but far from it. Raphael’s intelligence and acerbic wit are undiminished.

Those who have crossed his path will be aware of his ability to ‘verbalise easily’ and, as he himself confesses: ‘It is one of my failings that I know how to hurt people.’ Jonathan Miller is criticised for being insufficiently conscious of his Jewish heritage. Miller in turn described Raphael as displaying an unattractive ‘piranha-like savagery’ in his disapprovals. Kenneth Tynan comes under fire for his ‘smart-assery’ and ‘clenched fist and limp wrist’. But Raphael’s final assessment of him could be taken as a sort of tribute: ‘You were a one-off all the way, merely unforgettable, you bastard.’ George Steiner suffers a sustained attack for being gauche, malicious and too obviously ambitious, blessed with ‘a moist and spatulate tongue’ of ‘garrulous versatility’. Raphael subscribes to Isaiah Berlin’s view of Steiner as a ‘genuine phoney’.

After reading this book it becomes easier to understand why Raphael may have thought it fortunate that he somehow failed to gain a First in Moral Sciences at Cambridge. If he had, he could have been ‘lost in the rooms and corridors of academe’, as he writes to the Bedales classicist Kenneth McLeish. The truth is that Raphael possessed many gifts – those of a novelist and screenwriter as well as a classicist who translated Catullus and Petronius – and perhaps it was difficult for some of those addressed in these letters to keep up with him.

There are sideswipes at Kingsley Amis, who, like all alcoholics, ended up ‘living in pickle jars’; and his son Martin also comes under attack. About poor Doris Lessing: ‘I trudged through several volumes; sieved no treasures.’ Even the Royal Society of Literature earns displeasure. When Raphael was elected a Fellow more than 60 years ago it meant something. Now he refers to the institution with contempt.

He does, however, write with compassion about Dorothy Nimmo, his accomplished contemporary at Cambridge who was full of promise and received a starred First. Her undergraduate career, which she combined with being an actress and a poet, was unequalled. But she ended up in obscurity, the caretaker of a Friends’ Meeting House, after a disastrous marriage to an unfaithful husband. Raphael laments with sympathy her lack of renown. And he describes movingly his artist daughter Sarah, who died at the age of 40 – a blow difficult for any parent to bear.

The name-dropping continues, often with reference to the film industry. Stanley Kubrick, an aspirant classicist but Raphael’s intellectual inferior, is seen as the main beneficiary of their collaborations: ‘The friction between us freshened the sparks necessary for your forge.’ Kubrick is considered guilty of a kind of cancellation of Raphael’s contributions to some of his films – a non-recognition of work rendered. This is often the curse of screenwriters, as Raphael indicates to John Schlesinger and Jo Janni, who both showed a ‘presumption of authorship’, with no acknowledgment – or publicity – of Raphael’s input. Tom Cruise and Wolf Mankowitz receive the same acid treatment, as does Ken Loach. When Janni, immobilisd in old age, lacked visitors, Loach was ‘too busy hoping for the revolution to have any bourgeois manners’.

Raphael reveals himself as a networker – if an accidental one – and finishes with ‘the glittering prizes’ described in his 1976 television drama. Whether you’ve lived through most of the years covered in Last Post or notyou’ll be bound to find these letters to the dead who cannot answer back immensely entertaining.