Somewhere at the back of a cupboard in my house is the pair of tiny white lace shorts Shirley Conran gave me when I interviewed her in 2012. I’ve never worn them; although she insisted they were just the thing for bed, I worried they would frighten the horses even there. Yet every time I think of throwing them out, I’m unable to do it.

Conran, one of the funniest, sharpest people you could ever meet, bought those shorts to mark the publication of a new edition of Lace, her bestselling bonkbuster of 1982, and because of this I regard them as an important cultural artefact. One day, I may give them, along with my signed copy of Lace, to the Bodleian Library in Oxford: an acquisition that will illustrate to future generations both her lack of pretension, and the way in which women’s writing and reading was still belittled, even at the back........

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