At 68, Stephen Fry is finally the age he was meant to be. Even though he subscribes to the argument Cyril Connolly advances in Enemies of Promise, that privately educated schoolboys remain locked in a permanent adolescence, he has always been old.
At least that’s how it strikes those of us now in our sixties, who have aged with him. As dispassionate observers, we have watched him achieve ‘national treasure’ status, an honour bestowed on such disparate figures as Joanna Lumley and the Windrush generation, by those who decide such things. To them, Fry is as much an institution as the literary giants and characters that formed him: Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes and PG Wodehouse. Of the latter, Fry wrote, ‘in my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language’.
This year, Fry received a knighthood. It was inevitable but perhaps later than he, and the rest of us, expected, given he has been acquainted with the…