Journos de nos jours

• Alan Moorehead by Tom Pocock
  Bodley Head, 311 pp, £16.95, February 1990, ISBN 0 370 31261 9
• Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir by Carl Bernstein
  Macmillan, 254 pp, £15.95, January 1990, ISBN 0 333 52135 8
• Downstart by Brian Inglis
  Chatto, 298 pp, £15.95, January 1990, ISBN 0 7011 3390 2

The late James Cameron always liked to claim that the only male company in which he felt at home was that of his fellow journalists. They offered him, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘the conversational shorthand of completely common understanding’. Nor was his in any way an exceptional reaction. The existence across the world of various favoured journalistic watering-holes – sometimes grandly known as Press Clubs, more usually simply hotel bars with squatters’ rights established – is one proof of that. Never mind that they tend to be drab places: their defiant survival into the age of the Amex Gold Card is evidence of the herd instinct of the newspaper trade.