Patrick White chose a remarkable occasion to make his loyalties plain. The day after the news broke that he had won the Nobel Prize and Australians were claiming White as their own, he told the press assembled in his Sydney garden: ‘I feel what I am, I don't feel particularly Australian. I live here and work here. A Londoner is what I think I am at heart but my blood is Australian and that's what gets me going.’

He put it less politely in private. After not hearing from his old lover Pepe Mamblas for 25 years or more, the now Duke of Baena wrote to congratulate him on the prize. White replied: ‘Two years ago we were in Europe, but like it less and less. London, parts of the French provinces, and the mountains of Greece are all I want to see again. I am at heart a Londoner, only by fate an Australian; I imagine it's like being born with a hump or a clubfoot: one has to put up with it.’

White never doubted that returning to Australia after World War II was of fundamental importance to him as a man and an artist. The alternative, he wrote in his endlessly quoted essay Prodigal Son, was ‘remaining in what I then felt to be an actual and spiritual graveyard, with the prospect of ceasing to be an artist and turning instead into that most sterile of beings, a London intellectual’.

That he made such a fanfare of his escape and grizzled so much every time he visited the city as a lionised writer blinds us to the part London played in his life and writing. He was born there, discovered sex in the city and celebrated his first literary triumphs in London. His affection for the city was not sentimental. He complained about it all his life, with the love and despair of a native.

Even in his most reclusive years in Sarsaparilla, he never lost contact with London. He used a London bookshop and each week the airmail edition of the Observer arrived at his house on Showground Road.