Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten years. Foreign Correspondent is his account of those years, which now seem as distant as the belle époque, and when, if he is to be taken at face value, he met everyone who mattered – in most cases by chance.

Lennon is one of the old school of reporters, those qualified by low cunning, common sense, unquenchable curiosity and an ability to write, rather than by a diploma. His entry into the trade was typical. While undergoing a living death in a Dublin bank, he found himself as a very