HV. I was engrossed. Apart from anything else, there were such wonderful varieties of subject and address. Did you have any favourites – ones you were especially pleased to have in the book?

DS. Favourites fall into different categories – the best oratory, the hardest to uncover, the most unexpected – so quite hard to pick.

Certainly leading the pack would be the following:

George Floyd by Rev Al Sharpton

A real outlier in the book in that all other entries were for people whose achievements were celebrated during their life. George Floyd’s name was only publicly known as a result of his death. It’s a great eulogy by Al Sharpton, a man often derided as a self-obsessed blowhard; here he is wonderful.

Tony Wilson by Steve Coogan

I never really understood what ‘meta’ meant but perhaps it is something like this: a eulogy delivered to Tony Wilson by Steve Coogan, the man who played him in the film ’24 Hour Party People’.

Hilarious and with one of the perfect opening lines: ’I’m working in Hawaii right now’.

Marilyn Monroe by Lee Strasberg

A cliché free tribute to her acting not the tragic heroine persona so often drawn on.

HV. You write that you regret not being able to have Marc Bolan and Derek Jarman here - any others that you wish you could have included?

DS. Quite a few: Christine Keeler, Ozzy Osbourne, Charles Schulz, Whitney Houston, Raymond Carver to start with. I got some way in discussion about these and more so hopefully for volume 2!

HV. Given that most of the funeral tributes are affectionate - would there would be anyone’s eulogy you would insist on vetoing for a future book?

DS. I am interested in who people were rather than what they did so less keen on sports stars or Tory politicians.

HV. As you say – eulogies are usually more personal than official obituaries. Who knew that Carmen Callil was such a terrible driver or that William Burroughs grieved so much for his pet cat, Fletch?  I loved Louise Bourgeois saying apologetically, that she no longer travelled in space, only in time. (This phrase could be used imperiously – and I intend to use it that way in future)

Did you learn or take anything from the various and varying tributes?

DS. One of the joys of doing the book was finding out more of who people were and what made them tick – along with the bizarre perhaps only known to the eulogist and close friends, such as –

Vivienne Westwood put banana skins on her roses

Dusty Springfield only lived in Amsterdam because quarantine laws would not allow her to return to the UK with her beloved cats

And, magically, Brian Wilson clearly needed music even more than we thought.

HV. Your personal inclusions worked so well. For example, the punk attempts at your Catholic school made the subsequent reading by Terry Hall’s band mate Horace Panter all the more poignant. Did any of the inclusions make you feel especially sad or did the work of writing it push any emotions to one side?

DS. I did find writing it sad, partly because most of the eulogies were chosen because they looked at well-known people in more intimate, unexpected ways. I found Rob Halford’s account of bumping into Lemmy in an airport lounge late at night, holding his hand and telling him he loved him almost too much to bear. So raw.

HV. Who would you like to write your own eulogy (this is by nature of the game of who would be ideal guests at a dinner party – so feel free not to be modest)

DS. Crikey. Definitely not a cleric or a comedian. Perhaps somebody who you would have no idea what they might say – Van Morrison for example. Although in some ways, he’s both comedian and cleric.

HV.. I have had to tear myself away from A GOOD FUNERAL as I could sit all day, reading it. But walking round the co-op just now, I felt but some sort of reminder of there being, after all, an end to anxiety. Did you come away with this sort of tranquillity from having read all these eulogies?

DS. Perhaps not tranquility but definitely a sense of satisfaction where the spirit of a person was properly nailed in the best eulogies

HV. And finally, do you believe in life after death? I mean, do you see the subjects smiling down (or frowning, of course)

DS. Well, I am Catholic (in a pick n mix way these days) and in my father’s recent funeral, the talk was all about him going to meet my mother in heaven. I envied the total belief in my father going on to better things – like a job promotion, in a way – but I struggled to share that.

That said, I have always liked the idea of Princess Grace smiling down on me so perhaps I need to revise that view.