Marco had grown up in the same London world as I had. His father was a barrister and the family belonged to the same circle of professionals and artists as mine; left-leaning ­bourgeois ­bohemians with large houses in Islington or Holland Park or Notting Hill Gate. He was a few years older than me, which meant we weren’t friends as children, but I was always aware of his existence: he was one of those boys who exude a magical charisma of good looks and easy confidence that marks them in the consciousness of their generation as people to watch. He had a striking face, hawkish but epicurean, with eyebrows coming in at an angle like arrow fletchings, giving his eyes the mira fuerte—“forceful gaze”—of macho movie stars from that distant era, and strong lines either side of his slightly abbreviated-looking nose, curving out in a bell-shaped flourish around a firm-set but sensual mouth. His mother had been a model in Milan before she married, and his looks came mainly from her. From his father came the ruddy coloration of his cheeks, which added an appealing look of wind-blustered vigor to the general effect. We overlapped for a year or two at the same school in London, after which he went off to Cambridge, emerging a few years later as a precociously assured young talent in British television. Longish news features were what he first became known for, usually about political conflict and almost always pervaded by an atmosphere of danger that, intentionally or not, cast him in a glamorously intrepid light.

His first big coup came when the British ambassador to ­Uruguay was kidnapped by the Tupamaros guerrillas. Marco’s parents had a weekend cottage near the ambassador’s family farm in Sussex, and Marco was able to get an early interview with family members, blinking in shock outside their oast houses a few hours after news of the kidnapping reached England. On the back of this he got a commission to make a program about the guerillas themselves. Footage of Héctor Pérez distributing stolen food in the slums of Montevideo, along with a lingering close-up of the “People’s Prison” where the ambassador himself was possibly being held at the very moment of filming, provoked spasms of scandalized indignation in the right-wing press, ensuring Marco’s success with the Left, and providing the formula for future triumphs.

From the Tupamaros he went on to embed himself for periods with insurrectionists and paramilitaries across half the world. He was in Northern Ireland in 1975, filming a program that upset even some of his admirers, when the actions he was accused of decades later were alleged to have taken place.