Beryl Bainbridge was the greatest writer never to win the Booker

Beryl Bainbridge's acclaimed career owed almost as much to her social skills as to her writing skills and no literary party was complete without her.

But despite loving the party scene, she was also a highly talented wordsmith. When she failed to win the Booker in 1998 for the fifth time — for Master Georgie — even that year's winner, Ian McEwan, revealed that he thought she should have won it.

In novels ostensibly about the lives of famous people, her real skill was to imagine their interior lives with wonderful precision.

In person Beryl also shone. She was extremely kind and funny, more prone to making caustic comments about what another person was wearing than whether their book was any good or not.

Whenever I ran into her at a party, there she would be, usually in a tight suit, puffing on a fag and clutching a large drink, keen to tell me about her grandchildren and ask after my "lovely babies" as she called my children.

London's literary scene will miss her in more ways than one.