Michael Jacobs, Velázquez and me

When the writer Michael Jacobs found he was dying, he asked his friend Ed Vulliamy to complete his last book, a personal meditation on Velázquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas. Ed Vulliamy kept his promise. Here he recalls his friend’s humour, passion and indomitable spirit as they worked on it together• Extract: read Michael Jacobs on Las Meninas hereIn the winter months of early 2014, Jackie Rae – widow of a man I had come to know for a painfully brief period of time – sent me the manusc