My decision, events would prove, was a good one. It was 1997 and Country Life, of which I was editor, was having a centenary. As part of the celebrations, four issues were to be guest-edited by illustrious figures from our world, one of them being the dazzlingly well-connected photographer, Tony Snowdon.

Even someone with Lord Snowdon's experience of journalism was likely to need his hand held, his vanity stroked - and I knew that his sharp wit wouldn't spare anyone who didn't measure up to his exacting standards. Our stylish, life-enhancing features editor, Melanie Cable-Alexander, seemed just the person to take care of the project.

He really went for it, giving his own spin to every item that we ran. Like other creative people, he was obsessive. Deadlines were for the rest of us to worry about.

With hindsight, I realise that it may not only have been Tony's intense engagement with the content of Country Life that engrossed him; unbeknown to us, he was also intensely engaged with the beautiful Melanie, 33 years his junior, despite the fact he was still with his elegant and charming second wife, Lucy. Even so, the issue, which I've now got open before me, was redolent of personality. I wipe a tear as I turn the pages.

He had so many passions. Obviously we'd get a photograph by Snowdon himself in somewhere: he was not, perhaps, quite so original as Beaton or Avedon, but still a towering figure, who produced flashes of brilliance. So he photographed the girls-in-pearls image with which the magazine opens, his subject being Sarah Wildor, then first soloist at the Royal Ballet. Like Princess Margaret, of whom he spoke respectfully, as he did of all the Royal family, he was a balletomane.

In what was perhaps not his best inspiration, she wore a headdress in the form of a candelabra, with lighted candles on top - a tribute to the magazine's 100th birthday. Typically, this ingenious decoration was designed by Snowdon. Indeed, it was just the sort of thing he liked: inventive, funny, cunningly made. As anyone who visited the studio at the back of his home near Gloucester Road in London will remember, he loved tinkering. It's not for nothing that his son, Viscount Linley, became a furniture designer.

As it happened, we'd already published a Snowdon portrait that year. In August, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales had thrown the magazine into a spin. After we'd recovered from our initial shock and sorrow, we wondered how we could mark it in the next issue which was about to go to press. Snowdon provided the ideal image, showing the Princess in all her beauty, dressed only in black. The issue sold out instantly.

He shot a very different photograph for us the next April. In those days, we ran a column called "Living National Treasure", celebrating a great craft skill. Tony had discovered a corset-maker, Mr Pearl, whom he thought should be featured, and persuaded him to pose for the camera - wearing one of his own creations. His 18-inch waist proved a sensation. It was impossible for anything to go viral in those pre-internet days, but it did the next best thing.

That was pure Tony: a brilliant idea, impish, even a bit cruel.

Tony - who limped slightly from polio as a boy and felt stigmatised as a result, as well as blaming an unhappy childhood on his mother - could sometimes be cruel. But how he must have charmed Mr Pearl to carry it off. Just as he charmed other subjects into revealing aspects of their identity that they might have preferred not to make public, Lady Thatcher being a case in point. 

The rest of the guest-edited magazine was full of Tony's favourite things - theatrical, arty, design-focused, unexpected. The fashion editor was given the task of finding outfits from Oxfam shops. The late Brian Sewell wrote the motoring pages, about the 1922 Austin Seven - an unpretentious classic. Since William Kent was Tony's favourite architect, there was a piece on the royal barge that he designed - equally a classic, although heavily carved and gilded.

The only falling out came over an article about non-alcoholic drinks. Tony was firmly of the belief that people who didn't want to drink wine or spirits should be offered more enticing alternatives, his own favourite being a tomato-based beverage called Big Tom. "Revolting," said our wine correspondent, Merlin Holland, and he refused to include it. Crisis. For once the Snowdon charm didn't work.

I would see Tony at a restaurant near his house. An accomplished raconteur, every meal was seasoned with stories, hilariously told in a variety of accents and with devilishly precise mimicry. Ordering was never easy, though. Being in a restaurant at all was too flashy for someone of his tastes, which, he maintained, were extremely simple. Only the simplicity was never satisfied by the dishes offered on the menu. He would therefore ask the waiter if the kitchen couldn't find a little grilled cod (if hake were offered), or an artichoke (when he knew that was the one thing they didn't have). It was a kind of elaborate tease, by which Tony could display an almost monastic asceticism while commanding more attention than if he'd ordered (or I had, since the magazine was paying) the most expensive champagne.

What of Melanie? As she told The Daily Telegraph yesterday, she had a baby boy. Of unknown paternity at first, he became the Country Life baby - and then, when an astonished world (and flabbergasted office) learnt that the father was Tony, the press went mad. Her little flat, not even her own, was mobbed. For a while, she went into hiding.

A couple of years later, I visited her, Tony and their son Jasper at the farmhouse Tony kept at Nymans, site of the famous garden created by his grandparents and now owned by the National Trust. My wife Naomi wore high heels, which was a mistake - they kept catching in the rugs - and, although childlike at times childish himself, Tony had a rather Victorian attitude to children that baffled our own, who had never encountered such a governessy regime before. Tony only liked children once they were old enough to make things with him. How pleased he must have been to watch Jasper, now 18, who adored his father and saw him often in his last years, studying to become a film?maker.

My last memory of Tony was a recent one. Before Christmas I ran into his last assistant, Dylan Thomas, now himself an excellent photographer. Tony was by then failing, but Dylan had a late birthday present for him. It was a personalised Marmite jar, with the word Snowdon printed instead of Marmite. "He insisted we always took Marmite on shoots," remembered Dylan. "It was my job to remember it."

The present was exactly what he would have enjoyed.

The Sunday Telegraph