We’ve barely been speaking for five minutes when Tim Marlow rolls up his trouser-leg to show me the damage from a fall off his Vespa. He’d shown Gilbert and George, he says, and while one gasped theatrically at the bruises, the other remarked approvingly on his shapely calf.

Such stories bubble out of the art historian and broadcaster, unprompted. We meet at White Cube Mason’s Yard, the West End branch of Jay Jopling’s successful commercial gallery, where Marlow is exhibitions director. Before long, Marlow is regaling me with tales of interviewing the English surrealist Eileen Agar not long before she died – “to meet a woman in her 90s and think, ‘You’re still so sexy and wonderful’; what a knockout she must have been” – and of Picasso’s ability to sever hornets with a carving knife over an alfresco summer lunch. The word “enthusiast” might have been coined for him.