It is a personal sadness that I never did get to have a glass of wine with Felix Dennis or even listen to him reading his poetry, because he died in June, 2014.

It was not that I was personally acquainted with Felix you understand, even if he did write to me surprisingly often to offer me the opportunity of subscribing or re-subscribing to one of the many magazines from which he made his fortune. But Felix was a fantastic example of an Artful Strategist who combined a left brain highly disciplined approach to making money with a restless right brain capacity for spotting new opportunity and bringing colour and a ribald sense of humour to the grey world of publishing.

Whilst he is remembered for being one of the Oz Three, and the least intelligent one according to the trial judge, his greatest gift was an instinctual publishing nous that came from spotting emerging consumer enthusiasms like martial arts, home computers, lads-mags or highly distilled digests of weekly news.

Felix was not the typical MBA storm-trooper, but he knew how to draft a good mission statement, and what’s more, having spent £100m on drugs and women, he was even better at fulfilling one.