On this rainy Sunday afternoon, during a moment of rare peace before starting to cook the Sunday roast, I was idly browsing the British newspaper websites and came across a snippet of news that made me very sad.

It was a report of the death of the journalist and musician LJK Setright. ‘LJKS’ was a writer of extraordinary intellect and eloquence, an eloquence all the more unusual given the fact that he was a columnist for the monthly motoring magazine Car.

Setright – I have only just discovered that his initials stood for Leonard John Kensell – held me in thrall every month, first as a child and then as a teenager, as I eagerly devoured his thoughts on the latest cars, engineering ephemera, and classical music. His columns expanded my vocabulary more than any English teacher or textbook did, although I often had to summon my father’s help when Setright turned to Latin to clarify a point.

Until just now, I knew very little about Setright’s life. But obituaries have revealed that his background was as colourful as his writing. He was the son of Australian émigrés (his father invented the Setright rotary bus ticket machine and the Tote betting system) and he was an expert clarinet player. He was also famed for his archaic style of dress and moustache and, apparently, his heavy right foot. As the Guardian obituary reports,

As a driver, Setright was formidably fast to the point where at press launches he was usually given a vehicle of his own rather than have anyone else share one with him.

A rather more sombre revelation is the tragedy that struck Setright in 1980, while he was writing his columns, and the way he found solace:

His first wife, Christine, a professional opera singer, drove one of his beloved Bristols up to Scotland and committed suicide. Setright, seeking an abrupt change of life, moved to America, where a visit to a Lubavitch community in Texas reaffirmed his Judaism. Embracing a devout orthodoxy with his usual studious zeal, he became something of an expert on schechitah, or ritual slaughter.

One thing I did know was that Setright was a keen smoker, for he was often pictured with a cigarette. It was his penchant for Sobranie Black Russians that got him in the end, at the age of 74, but he was unrepentant:

... one of his last essays eloquently railed against manufacturers that now offer non-smoking cars. "It is refreshing," he concluded, "that there remain stalwarts for whom driving and smoking - two of the greatest pleasures known to man - are not to be separated."

A typical Setright observation and, given our increasingly sanitised world, I'm inclined to agree. Setright was right, right until the end.