Did Jomier only write in his journal about his encounters with girls? If, instead of leaping through his life in microseconds with the search facility, Jomier scrolls down the pages of ‘Journals 1950–1970’ he sees that there are long, and now tedious, passages about politics. Jomier and Marco decide to right the wrongs that prevail in the world. They have a one-word solution. Revolution! They are both Communists – not party members but fellow-travellers. Marx: ‘Our aim is not to understand the world but to change it!’ Jomier and Marco see themselves as Left Bank left-wing intellectuals with Gauloises dangling out of their mouths – Sartre, Camus, Aragon. But both are cautious. At the great demonstration against the war in Vietnam outside the American Embassy, they stand at the back of the crowd, ready to retreat to Claridge’s. Jomier cannot serve the proletariat as a lawyer with a conviction for a breach of the peace. And Marco dislikes physical proximity with the masses: throughout the fracas in Grosvenor Square he covers his nose with a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne.

Jomier is now more embarrassed by his socialistic past than his fingering of young women’s private parts. Marx, Lenin, Mao, Castro were his heroes. Even Stalin! Without the industrialisation of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, he explains in his journal, there would have been no T-54 tanks to defeat the Germans on the Kursk salient. Hitler would have been victorious. An Auschwitz-Birkenau would have been built in England’s green and pleasant land.

Jomier reads on. The Russians were right to crush the Hungarians in 1956. And the Czechs in 1968. Without Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, all the old casus belli would be revived. The Sudetenland. The Danzig corridor. It was the only way to kill off German revanchism once and for all.