In 1917, at the Teatro Municipal in Lima, Peru, the 13-year-old Frederick Ashton saw Anna Pavlova dance. She was in the midst of one of her interminable tours, offering, night after night, the sometimes sugary delights of her repertoire. What happened to Ashton when he saw her first step on to the stage in The Fairy Doll was that blinding, revelatory moment that sometimes happens to a child.

Ashton once said to me of Pavlova: “She injected the poison in my veins.” The poison was the desire to dance, an ambition that family circumstance and social conventions were to thwart until Ashton was a young man (the lightly rouged spectre of “chorus boys” loomed dreadfully large for a decent bourgeois family in the 1920s). But still he resolved to become “like” Pavlova, to enrapture by movement, to recapture the glamour, the allure of this magical woman. From the age of 20 he started to study ballet.