In Italo Calvino’s essay on Our Mutual Friend, collected in his posthumous book Why Read the Classics?, he singles out for praise this ‘descriptive cityscape’ of Dickens: ‘A grey dusty withered evening in London city has not a hopeful aspect. The closed warehouses and offices have an air of death about them, and the national dread of colour has an air of mourning. The towers and steeples of the many house-encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the sky that seems descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom.’ Our Mutual Friend was first published in book form in November 1865. But it seems very similar to evenings around Leadenhall Market that I remember when I was working at Lloyd’s of London. That was in the late 1970s, but I don’t imagine it is any different today.

Most people (though not me) would surely take issue now with that marvellous phrase ‘the national dread of colour’. Visit any branch of Waterstones and the range of books on colour in the Art department suggests that we are trying desperately to exorcise that national dread. The paperback edition of Kassia St Clair’s The Secret Lives of Colour, for example, is so popular that it is already in its tenth printing. Ecstatic reviews appear all over the book’s covers. A particularly puzzling one is from The Sunday Telegraph: ‘If you want to fall back in love with colour read this book’. But why would one have fallen out of love with colour? And even if you had, why would you be so anxious to reverse the process? Then there is Karen Haller’s A Little Book of Colour. She is keen on the idea that we all have a favourite colour. She wants to explain what the choice of our favourite colour tells us about ourselves. But what does it say about me that I don’t have a favourite colour? And, furthermore, that I am baffled by the author’s blithe assumption that everyone does?

It is probably just old age that accounts for my increasing propensity, when visiting museums and art galleries, to seek out the drawings, the black and white photographs. Last year I was very impressed by an exhibition at The Courtauld of charcoal portraits by Frank Auerbach, dating from the 1950s. I was surprised because I have never had much time for Auerbach as a painter. Lines of Dryden from his Epistle: To My Honoured Friend Sir Robert Howard, albeit written in a different context, come to mind when confronted by Auerbach’s portrait paintings: ‘His colours laid so thick on every place/ As only showed the paint, but hid the face’. And why do I so much more enjoy black and white films than those in colour? The director Josef von Sternberg once wrote of the advent of colour film in the cinema: ‘The value of colour is determined by the value of the artist who uses it. There are many great painters alive who excel in the use of colour’. But not, apparently, in the world of cinema. Von Sternberg continued: ‘When I took Karl Vollmoeller to a much-vaunted film in colour he expressed judgment tersely by saying “It would have been bad even without colour” ’.