I heard the news yesterday in a phone call from a reporter. “Donald Horne is dead.” Since then I’ve had a continuous movie playing in my head: of conversations with Donald and scenes of Donald being his public and his private self.

I loved him. But he often drove me nuts. Many people who knew him couldn’t get past the being driven nuts to savour the thinking, the stimulation and the pure wicked joy of doing stuff alongside Donald. I was his deputy when he chaired the Australia Council in the 80s. Sometimes I was his go-between when he conducted one of his enormous feuds with bureaucrats, government ministers or fellow Councillors. He was always driven by ideas. If he scorned a person it was often because he believed they were putting personal advancement ahead of doing the right, or most interesting, thing.

As I said once in a speech about him, Donald was never an unselfconscious, self-deceiving famous person. In his books, he provided capitalised captions for himself as a way of highlighting the ridiculous elements of his character, and of public office. The best-known pair are “Young Donald Mumbler of Witticisms” and “D R Horne Angry Shouter.” My favourite of his images of himself is “D R Horne Staring Down an Idiot.” Many people have seen that sight.

He wasn’t interested in gossip, but I do remember him relaying some, once, to great strategic effect. During the Oz Council days, he and I and Max Bourke (a general manager of the Council who loved Donald too) were waiting for a politician to turn up to a crucial meeting. We had rather nervously rehearsed our pitch when Donald dropped the hot news that the married politician in question was having an affair with his own brother-in-law. That put us right on the front foot.

In later years I tried to get him to gossip to me about the Packers. He had such marvellous stories, mostly about Frank Packer, but he wasn’t really interested in passing them on, except for true purpose in his books. When little observations popped out, they had elliptical power. He told me once that Frank’s wife Gretel was “the kind of woman who would stub out a cigarette in a jar of face cream.”

Donald’s autobiographies are wonderful books. Portrait of an Optimist and Into the Open are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Packer empire. But I would never have dared write this while Donald was alive because he hated being seen as a conduit of information about other people.

Barry Oakley, in this morning’s Australian, has captured Donald’s spirit.