One evening Brian Howard, David’s wayward friend (and model for Evelyn Waugh’s Anthony Blanche), annoyed Virginia so much that, with one finger, she gently pushed him off his stool and watched him fall backwards in slow motion. But her daughter Pauline and Virginia would become lifelong friends: “I loved her because she loved my father.”Tennant married Virginia Parsons in 1938 – an event celebrated by more of his somewhat surreal verse: “A jungle-striped pride issued from your loins / To meet a cosmic woman in your breast” – and they honeymooned in New York, Nassau, Cuba and Mexico, only to be recalled by Lord Glenconner to sort out problems at the Gargoyle (where, as Anthony Powell complained, on Saturday nights the place was filled with “the 200 nastiest people in Chiswick”).The rooftop club continued to mix all classes of people, borne up in its rickety lift for the nightly bacchanalia. Tennant, then undergoing one of his periodical bouts of depression, was all too responsive to the young girl: “When I first saw your face, I thought of it as a charm / A charm given me – gratis – the right to love again. Moffat’s wife and Virginia’s aunt, Iris Tree, was, with Cunard and Diana Cooper, a leader of the First World War, proto-flapper “Corrupt Coterie”.

Later, the Moffats would throw hashish parties in their Hampstead flat, while Virginia’s mother, Viola, was “completely crazy”, recalls Pauline, Lady Rumbold: “She drove her car through Marble Arch.” As if in reaction to such remarkable relatives, Virginia was “a very secret, private person”, says Lady Rumbold, who became her stepdaughter: Virginia had in her nature all these things Yet. Her own family were hardly conventional.Virginia had grown up in Fitzroy Square, deep in London’s Fitzrovia, where her uncle, Curtis Moffat, ran a kind of exotic bazaar from which Nancy Cunard acquired her “barbaric” jewellery. Parsons, not yet out of her teens, was the daughter of the actress Viola Tree – wife of Alan Parsons, drama critic of the Daily Mail – and granddaughter of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the great Edwardian actor-manager. But then, with her wide-boned face, glittering eyes and sweep of curly hair, Virginia’s was the kind of timeless beauty which would bewitch more than one aristocrat.Tennant, then in his thirties, was the third son of Lord Glenconner: a former BBC announcer, leader of the Bright Young Things, and founder of the socially radical Gargoyle Club in Meard Street, Soho, with its mirrored walls and a dance floor on which cavorted everyone from Dylan Thomas to Augustus John. Virginia Penelope Parsons: born 9 April 1917; married 1938 The Hon David Tennant (two daughters; marriage dissolved 1953), 1953 The Marquess of Bath (died 1992; one daughter); died Crockerton, Wiltshire 18 September 2003.

As Bell memorably reasoned: “If you want an open society, you have to put up with the chaos.”Adrian Dannatt. These exhibitions such as “Zion Works” took place regularly in Manhattan galleries such as Kim Foster and Janos Gat as well as art centres in Hungary and Ireland.In the 1990s Bell launched a third career as art critic for the journal Review, articles that gained him increasing renown as critic and demonstrated his impeccable prose style. His seminal work on the “Dragonworld” of covert communications appeared in the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence. As well as more than 20 books Bell published countless essays and articles. For these works Bell travelled and researched ceaselessly, becoming accustomed to being kidnapped in Yemen, held hostage in Jordan, booted out of Kenya and shot at in Lebanon: A great deal of time must be passed in the lobbies of small provincial hotels waiting for someone to drive you to someone else who is not inclined to be very forthcoming. He became something of a celebrity in Ireland, being a key speaker in 1994 at the West Belfast Festival, and his books were held in reverence, not least by harder-line Republican elements. In the words of the Sinn Fein Vice-President Des Long, “He was the first historian to link the modern IRA with the Republican struggle from 1916.”But Bell was also an expert on the Italian Mafia and its many links with international terrorism and published extensively on the Middle East.