This second interview was conducted over a period of days in New York’s West Village in the spring of 2010.

MILES CHAMPION: It’s been a few months since we left off, and I thought we might recommence by filling in a couple of gaps in the historical record, starting with your and John Ashbery’s visit to Utopia Parkway in November 1969, shortly after you moved to New York. Joseph Cornell records the visit in his diary thus: ‘Cerise rabbit presented to Trevor Winkfield.’ You’re an admirer of the white rabbits in Uccello’s ‘The Battle of San Romano’ – is there a connection?

TREVOR WINKFIELD: John had written a very glowing article about Cornell’s Guggenheim retrospective a couple of years before, and Cornell had rewarded him with a collage. The ostensible purpose of our trip to Queens was to pick up a frame that Cornell had eventually chosen to protect John’s collage (a nondescript, store-bought frame, if my memory of John’s rather crestfallen visage serves me correctly). Cornell and I got talking about our mutual love of Uccello, and I mentioned that one of Cornell’s rabbit-box constructions had reminded me of the rabbits scampering across the background in Uccello’s painting. Cornell then led us reverentially into the front living room where his disabled brother Robert had lived, and which he kept as a shrine, virtually untouched since Robert had died a few years before - very 1920s, very Psycho. He brought out a beautiful ...