Adrien Bosc’s bestselling book is a wide-ranging study of an Air France plane crash in the Azores in 1949, in which several high-profile passengers died. Bosc describes it as fiction, saying in an author’s note, ‘Constellation is unequivocally a novel, a truelife novel to probe the fiction at the heart of our lives.’ However, this is a French linguistic fudge: if Constellation were a made-up story it would lose most of its virtue. Anybody can invent stories; it takes time and determination to quarry out real-life ones.

In those far-off days, at a time when a plane flying from Europe to the USA needed to come down in the Azores to refuel, you had to be somewhat exotic, or simply rich, to fly at all. At least two passengers on the Lockheed Constellation F-BAZN had