Alex didn’t know that Betty’s husband had tried to have him tortured and murdered. Neither did Eileen, Alex’s wife. By the time this was revealed in Peter Hruby’s book Dangerous Dreamers (2010) they had all died natural deaths. I knew these people at the time of the Vietnam War when Whitlam was just moving into temporary power. We occupied a small world back then. Like most of my jobs it began accidentally when Gallimard, a major French publisher, decided not to renew its paperback publishing licence with Hachette but create its own paperback imprint, Folio. The decision in Paris gave…