The late James Cameron always liked to claim that the only male company in which he felt at home was that of his fellow journalists. They offered him, he wrote in his autobiography, 'the conversational shorthand of completely common understanding'. Nor was his in any way an exceptional reaction. The existence across the world of various favoured journalistic watering-holes - sometimes grandly known as Press Clubs, more usually simply hotel bars with squatters' rights established - is one proof of that. Never mind that they tend to be drab places: their defiant survival into the age of the Amex Gold Card is evidence of the herd instinct of the newspaper trade.

LRB 8 March 1990 | PDF Download