I know Diana Athill – or I know OF Diana Athill, to be more precise – because I’m a regular reader of The Guardian. In 2009, they published an essay by Athill, who was already over 90 at the time, about why she decided to move into an old people’s home. I read it and I immediately fell in love. And I’m not even a person who likes memoirs much, not to mention have any passionate interest in old people’s homes.

Athill is an editor who has worked with everybody, from Philip Roth to Margaret Atwood, from Updike and Naipaul to Jean Rhys and Jack Kerouac. She has a formidable personality and judging by her writing and interviews, is entirely non-sentimental and extremely incisive. She never married, never had children, but conducted numerous affairs and lived a long time in the same flat with her former lover and his new lover, a set-up most people would find at least unconventional, if not scandalous.

This would be enough to endear her to me, but there’s more. Despite this piece in The Guardian, it somehow didn’t register with me for a long time that she is a great writer herself. She has written one novel and some short stories, but is mostly known for her candid memoirs that include a suicide of one of her lovers (Waguih Ghali, in After a Funeral) and her relationship with Hakim Jamal, a cousin of Malcolm X and a prominent radical himself (in Make Believe).

I have only read her latest and lightest book, a collection of musings called Alive, Alive Oh! It doesn’t have a theme, it talks about everything from her childhood home to a miscarriage, from the legacy of colonialism in Trinidad and Tobago to the Second World War. It’s delightful reading, both for the beauty of the language and the clarity of thought. And for the fact that it talks both from the perspective of a very old person and (in some pieces) about very old persons.

While I don’t want to make too much of it, it is nevertheless true that one reason I enjoyed the book so much is that she is 98 years old now and the texts are all written in recent years. She is that rare creature: an old woman, with opinions, in the public eye – and this can be a precarious position to be, as evidenced by Mary Beard. While I can never hope to achieve the level of coolness displayed by Ms Athill, I am so, so glad that lives like hers are possible.

And I’m sort of looking forward to meeting people who claim that women are by default less intelligent then men, prone to hysterics and incapable of rational thought. I would smile serenely and say: “Oh, but have you met Diana Athill?”