But for Conran, sex is all part of a lifestyle that includes shopping, eating, and designing. For instance, he claims in the book to have revolutionized the sex life of all Europe by introducing duvets to the French. It’s a tongue-in-cheek remark, of course, but he’s serious that the duvet, being symbolic of social change, was the best product he ever sold. Hang on, Terence, I ask him: didn’t the French have duvets before you came along?

“I don’t think they did. They had them in Austria and Switzerland, but not in France, except maybe in the Alpine areas. I remember that when we opened Habitat in France in 1973 - in Paris and Montpellier - we brought our duvets over with us. The French were quite surprised by them.

“At the time, duvets were seen as Swedish, and Sweden and sex were synonymous. Everybody knew that the Swedes had duvets, and this simple way to make a bed in 20 seconds somehow all seemed part of a new, liberated lifestyle.”

But then, according to Sir Terence, the French also needed him to remind them of their Frenchness. “They didn’t live that life. They’d put it all behind them. They’d forgotten about those simple, ordinary, everyday things. They’d fallen in love with America and American things - including the detestable out-of-town supermarket. I think we had more of an impact in France than in Britain.”

But, er, didn’t the French already instinctively have good things like the plain white porcelain for which Habitat became famous? Not according to Sir Terence. “If you went into the markets, you’d find these stacks of pottery factory rejects and so on. But very few of them would be undecorated. You didn’t get those piles of white plates you see today, which look as though they come out of a nunnery.”

So we must believe that Terence alerted the French to their own vanishing patrimony, just in the nick of time, while simultaneously making we Brits all sophisticated and continental. One might argue with this somewhat subjective view of history, just as later it occurs to you that Terence was perfectly happy to build his own out-of-town stores in France, but this would be to carp. Conran was and is a genuinely important cultural figure. There is nobody like him. He is very nearly as big a phenomenon as his own ego.

You could easily fault the old Habitat for the quality of some of its goods (not for nothing was it sometimes dubbed “Shabitat”) but never on the essential, defiantly William Morris ethos of the place: good design for the masses. Well, if not the masses, then at any rate the middle classes. In fact, Conran succeeded a great deal better than Morris in this aim. Morris ran a shop and various craft workshops in the late 19th century but never got the hang of bulk production, and he remained, to his frustration, a supplier to the rich. Conran, himself a furniture and textile designer by training and inclination, had built his own factory in Norfolk, and moved 80 families from London to the country to work in it, by the time he was 30. That was 1961, three years before he made what in retrospect seems the logical next step but which at the time was revolutionary: to start a chain of shops to sell the furniture and the accoutrements to go with it. Thus Habitat was born.