Some of the least intelligent types were the Arabophiles (and still are), notably the women. Claire Sheridan, who went to live in Biskra, Algeria, wrote that all Arabs seemed "tall, handsome and elegant". Lady Evelyn Cobbold laid down that "the heart of an Arab has no room for anything if not for love, pure, true and constant." Claire Sheridan had "never heard of an impotent Arab". Freya Stark could be witty. But her senses deserted her when she came to the Jews: "I can't see that there is any kind way of dealing with the Zionist question except by a massacre now and then [...] the world has chosen to massacre them at intervals and whose fault is that?"

But lack of intelligence cannot always be advanced as an excuse. Two of the worst      examples Pryce-Jones produces were both elected heads of Oxbridge colleges: Christopher Hill, the fervent pro-Soviet apologist who doubted whether the Gulag had ever existed, and Joseph Needham, who licked Mao's boots. Where they led others followed. Tony Benn called Mao "the greatest man of the 20th century" and Giscard d'Estaing referred to him as "a lighthouse for humanity" the man who killed 70 million of his compatriots. Then again, Charles James Fox was not stupid. But he nonetheless hailed the French Revolution with his fatuous: "How much the greatest event it is that ever appeared in the world. And how much the best!"

However one should not be too censorious. Few of us have an exemplary record in this area. I recall writing a shamefully silly article welcoming the revolt of the students in Paris in May 1968, one of the most absurd non-events of the 20th century. Only that noble man Raymond Aron got it right at the time. I also hailed Castro's takeover in Cuba, though I had already been subjected to a personal harangue by that monumental bore (it is true that he gave me a box of excellent cigars). Pryce-Jones, I suppose, has never fallen for the heady wind of change, and therefore can afford to be censorious. I think he underrates and misjudges Hazlitt who, as Charles Lamb said, "sometimes does bad things but is not a bad man". He is hard on poor old Glubb Pasha, with whom I once had a long talk and who struck me as a simple, decent fellow. Kingsley Martin, whom I knew well, was much more worried by his mistaken moral choices than Pryce-Jones gives him credit for. 

But I forgive the author for the occasional items of information which were new to me. I did not know, for instance, that Coleridge burnt the words "Liberty and Equality" with gunpowder onto the lawns of two Cambridge colleges. And I liked the portrait of the egalitarian communist Douglas Garman, who lived with the billionaire Peggy Guggenheim in Paris. He studied Marx in a shed at the end of their garden while she lay in bed wearing fur gloves and reading Proust. 

Among Pryce-Jones's immense cast of characters, it is not always easy to see where conviction ends and sheer eccentricity begins — or how much wickedness to attribute to malice aforethought and how much to the simple inability to think clearly.