Keith Waterhouse, who has died at the age of 80, was a spirit of more than one lost age. His acerbic, precise and accessible writing kept his name and columns before the large readership of the Daily Mail for the last quarter of a century of a long, successful and ­bibulous life.

Waterhouse was one of the last of that cohort of working-class journalists – without formal education, elevated to fame and wealth through industry and love of language – who started their trade soon after the second world war.