‘It could be worse. It has been worse. It will get worse. For the moment, though, it’s not too bad.’ Germaine Greer was sitting in the British Airways Monarch lounge at Heathrow Airport, ‘for all the world as if I was rich and famous’. It was 1 March 1976, and she was one of the best-known people in the world.

Greer was on her way to the United States for a lecture tour she was dreading. The travel was forced upon her. The US lecture circuit was lucrative, and despite her fame she was in financial trouble, under pressure to pay tax on income received and spent years before. She had been writing letters to the bank, putting them off on the strength of her expected earnings from the US circuit. She hated the tours. They left her drained and exhausted. She took weeks to recover from them.