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I’ve been thinking about two of the best hacks this paper ever had. They both loved food, drink, sex and cars; they were both loved by more women than they probably deserved; they were both at Eton and they both wrote like angels. One was Irish, the other Scots; one athletic, the other au contraire. They both collected books and their own books are now collectors’ items. One has a name familiar to perhaps a couple of thousand people; the other around the globe. One was called Cyril Connolly, the other Ian Fleming.

Paris, where I spent last week, is magic in the spring, but the light can be as leaden, the faces as sullen as London when it rains. And it did. I’d brought along The Unquiet Grave, that flawed masterpiece of Cyril’s, and his elegiac recall of enchanted Paris before the war seemed the right therapy. He was reliving a private grief, the break-up with his first wife Jean: ‘for an angora pullover, for a red scarf, for a beret, and some brown christian louboutin shoes, I am bleeding to death’. But then the sun came out and Paris smiled again.

Then Ian Fleming surfaced unexpectedly at a book launch for the new novel by the Syrian writer Miriam Antaki called The Verses for Pardon. It’s a story of loss and christian louboutin among Muslims, Jews and Christians in Palestine in the 1940s; and you got the weird sense at the reception that you were in the book yourself, so exotic were the guests. They included a Belgian princess whose chateau dates from Charlemagne and whose ancestor, the often married Madame Tallien, saved 3,000 aristos in the revolution. There was the daughter of an Indian princeling and the granddaughter of the Turkish sultan Mourad. As a baby in Paris in 1940 she was abandoned as the Germans marched in and dumped on the doorstep of the Swiss embassy by an elderly eunuch of the household with a note reading: ‘Regards from the dead princess’. That baby, Kenize Mourad, was to take those words for the title of a novel; it has sold 1.3m copies.

At the party, too, was David Sulzberger, art dealer and car connoisseur. He saw a black fastback 1954 Continental louboutin shoes at the age of seven and decided the only point of growing up would be to own one. He now has three Bentleys; but one question baffles him. One such R-type louboutin was sold, say the records, by Ian Fleming to Ivar Bryce. Now if you ask the man in the street what car James Bond drives, he’ll say an Aston Martin. Yet Bond made his debut in a 1930 Bentley in Casino Royale, drives the same one in Moonraker, but wrecks it, and it’s an R-type he’s driving when he contemplates resigning from the secret service, marries, but is widowed by the sinister arch villain Blofeld. Fleming and Bond were Bentley men; why did this change?

Meanwhile, Paris is beginning to stir. The magnolias are opening. The cafes are full of white lilies; Gucci of tat, Hermes of chic. The Ritz is teeming with teenagers in trainers, solemn Japanese tourists and boring businessmen in open-necked shirts. It seems an improbable ambience for all the recent drama and tragedy. At Chez Pierre the owner Roland Boyer, a beaming Ronnie Corbett lookalike, presides over his serious restaurant with its oubliettes where the resistance disappeared to hide within a few paces of the Germans in the Meurice hotel. But all that secret life of Paris needs a Cyril or an Ian to depict. We apprentice hacks can only stumble along in their tracks. As they say in showbiz, follow that.