We bonded over socks, of all things. Somehow, over the course of our 11-year friendship, they became a recurring theme, an unlikely leitmotif, even prompting a media furore we forever more referred to, through fits of laughter, as “sockgate”.

When I heard Barbara Taylor Bradford had died – peacefully, at her Manhattan home, aged 91, on Sunday – it was the memory of her delivering the quote that so enraged the Fourth Wave feminists that made me well up. “I think the sort of woman who would quibble over who picks up a shirt, pair of underpants or socks really needs to grow up,” she told me, straight-backed and defiant in one of her gold-buttoned Pauline Trigère numbers. “If you love a man, stop being so childish and pick up his f---ing socks.”

The Telegraph London