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In the days preceding the Yom Kippur War, Leonard Cohen was at war with his girlfriend, Suzanne Elrod. It was October 1973 on the cockerel-crowing Greek island of Hydra, and Suzanne and Leonard were quarrelling over their child, their greed, their unkindness, their bitter tongues and their ancestors, as he would later write in the unpublished prose work The Final Revision of My Life in Art . His shoulder ached. He grit his teeth too much. He was nervous.

In the early Seventies, Cohen had become an internationally recognised singer-songwriter, on the strength of such releases as “Suzanne”, “So Long, Marianne”, “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” and “Famous Blue Raincoat”. The vanity of his profession made him sick. He was disgusted with the music business, repeatedly and publicly announcing his intention to retire. “It’s over,” he told an interviewer in March 1973, in his histrionic, petulant way. “I wish everybody well on ‘the rock scene’… But I don’t want to be in it.…