Mary Tudor supposedly said that when she was “dead and opened, you shall find Calais engraved on my heart”. When I go, key passages from Unreliable Memoirs — on spiders, masturbation and “the whole secret of kacking your pants” — will be found burned into my brain, next to the first chapter of Moby-Dick and the line-up, one to 15, of Will Carling’s first grand slam team.