Indeed, a self-portrait from 1993 shows him standing, with palette and scraper, stark-naked. His only portrait of Bacon, painted in 1952 and acquired by the Tate, was described by William Feaver as “the most important small portrait of the 20th century”. Sadly, it was stolen in 1988 from a British Council exhibition in Berlin, and Freud went to the lengths of asking the thief to return it – 2,5000 copies of a “wanted” poster featuring his plea – “Would the person who holds the painting kindly consider allowing me to show it in my exhibition next June?” – were plastered over the city.Freud’s interest in painting figures waned in the early 1970s, and he began obsessively to paint the scene outside his back window – thistles, buttercups, urban detritus. When his father died, he produced Wasteground With Houses, Paddington, and began a 15-year sequence of studies of his declining mother. Later, he turned to spectacularly amplitudinous naked sitters – Leigh Bowery, the gay performer, and Sue Tilley, the gargantuan flesh mountain in Benefits Supervisor Resting, for example.Freud is known these days as “The Hermit of Holland Park”, though he has a second studio in Kensington. He never gives interviews, and emerges only very occasionally to appear in the corner of parties or restaurants His voice is still soft, guttural, recognisably old-German.

He has been a seasoned gambler over the years, sometimes accepting commissions to pay off debts But he is not a man who takes commissions with enthusiasm. When Prince Charles let it be known, in 1994, that he was keen to own a Freud portrait – and offered one of his own pleasant watercolours as a swap – he was turned down flat. Freud also rejected commissions to paint the Pope and Diana, Princess of Wales. He still paints all the time with a ceaseless flow of energy and ideas that startles his admirers. “I don’t know how much time I have left,” he says, “and I’m full of aches and pains So I want to paint as much as possible. I’d like, ideally, to die in the studio, brush in hand.”His life has been 80 years of gazing – with horror, with compassion, with chilly artistic detachment. A friend of mine who watched him lunching in Soho recently described how Freud’s elongated foxy face looked as though it was “stretched out by scrutiny”, his features physically changed, drawn out by the effort of looking, the whole map of his face attenuated by a lifetime of straining to see what’s really there..

Purveyors of the bland, the unauthentic and the mediocre will have been sleeping easier since last December, when Britain’s most vitriolic, knowledgeable and literate restaurant critic handed in his napkin after a 15-year stint at The Times. The culinary content of his critique of Planet Hollywood is limited to five words: “The food, incidentally, is crap.”A further reason for Meades’s staying power is his near-limitless reservoir of bile. The twin passions propelling this book are a profound appreciation of top-notch cuisine, preferably French in origin and visceral in content, and a Swiftian disdain for the tastes of the mass of the populace. Both aspects are expressed with impressive fluency and passion. The result is that extreme rarity, a book of collected journalism that merits its hard covers.Every paragraph contains at least one memorable expression or arcane nugget. There is also a generous seasoning of jokes, often in stunning bad taste.

None is more shocking than his reflection when Marco Pierre White gave him a bottle of ’66 P?us in apology for a slight faux pas concerning Meades’s dead mother: “If a mother gets you a ’66 P?us, what do a cousin, an uncle, an aunt get you?”Piquant as a well-seasoned pig’s spleen, the book succeeds in its aim “to be read rather than consulted” In some respects, I wish it was more of a reference work Shuffled vaguely into themes, his critiques are undated. Numerous establishments have gone out of business since Meades tucked in there. The 0-10 grading he applied so enjoyably in The Times has been excluded. Irritatingly, only one of the meals in this banquet is priced (£180 for two at the Quat’ Saisons).