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“I was almost the sixth column that day,” he said, before approaching the bouquets that lined the floor.

In 1941, he wrote Sixth Column, a novel based on a story by Campbell, in which “pan-Asians” enslave the US, which fights back with a ethnic-specific ray gun that can kill the “slanty” and “flat face”.

The Times buried the story at the very bottom of the sixth column of page 7, a seven-liner consisting of the bald facts and nothing else, below the racing results from Sandown, Doncaster and Hamilton, and news of a rugby friendly between a British team on tour in New Zealand and a combined Waikato-King Country / Thames Valley side.

Si loved every aspect of magazine-making and had an eye for both the grand and the infinitesimal—countless times I saw him turn to the 10th page of a P&L and find the one number in the sixth column that seemed out of whack, or he could point to the edition number on a cover spine that hadn’t been changed from the month before.

Starting it on the sixth column was a very odd decision for the Times’ constructor to make—and yet this odd decision was replicated in Parker’s version.