Candida Lycett Green, who has died aged 71 of cancer, often said that she had never been "just me", that the first half of her life was spent as "John Betjeman's daughter" and the latter part, after her younger son achieved fame as a DJ, being "John Lycett Green's mum".
It was an understandable, but misguided view of a life shaped by a force of character entirely her own. She was a prolific writer, broadcaster and journalist. She also edited the two volumes of her father's letters published in 1994 and 1995. Her genius, however, was for less tangible things, for friendship and the ability to bring out the unexpected best in people. Uninterested in convention, either following or deliberately subverting it, she made and maintained a network of connections that amounted to a contour map of postwar England complete with unlikely juxtapositions and the "good laughs", which were, as she wrote in the last weeks of her life, "really the point".
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