A world of friends

THE glittering, hooded eyes captured guests even before they sat down. His apartment high above the Thames was full of paintings of famous men—he had a penchant for popes—but they struggled to compete with George. (He was rarely, after first acquaintance, “Lord Weidenfeld”.) Somewhere in the room would be the guest of honour: Angela Merkel, perhaps, whom he had befriended when she was still a middling Christian Democrat politician, or an Israeli general. He would invite them to take the floor, with an elegant introduction and a couple of probing questions to stimulate discussion. But it was the rotund, courtly son of an Austrian classics teacher who was the dazzler-in-chief, inexhaustibly unearthing facts, analogies, literary allusions and personal connections from his elephantine memory.

English diffidence tended to elude him; assiduity was more his thing. Yet the conversational flow was not ponderous or one-way; he was just as interested in new people and ideas as in old ones. And, as he had learned when the Nazis turned his comfortable childhood upside down, you could never have enough friends.