The British Museum curator Ian Jenkins and I were unlikely allies. I remember, as a postgraduate student, thinking him terrifying – not just academically conservative (everyone whose heels I was snapping at in those days was liable to that charge) but potentially disapproving. Sixteen years later, he and I were going through the draft of my book Classical Art: a Life History in his tiny office in the British Museum, paper everywhere. He was the only specialist in Greek art, other than my husband, whose (dis)approval I had sought on the whole book – and his advice was invaluable. He was a treasure trove of information, and gloriously irreverent with it. I gained more expansive vistas on all sorts of things – from classical sculpture to Hadrian’s hellenism to classicism in China, not to mention the merits of my typescript vis-à-vis others he was reading, and was ticked off for my ‘mild tendency to construct complex sentences’. I often think of Ian when I write, and was at my laptop revising my latest book when news of his passing reached me. He had long suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and died suddenly on 28 November.