For “sheer cushiness”, says Bryan Burrough in The Yale Review, there has probably never been a “more palatial home” for writers than Vanity Fair during Graydon Carter’s editorship from 1992 to 2017. When I went to Sydney for a story, they put me up in a Four Seasons suite overlooking the Opera House. In London, it was Claridge’s. Dinner parties at home could be “catered on the company’s dime”; editors were given interest-free loans to buy new property. There was even an “eyebrow lady” who came into the office to “tweeze everyone’s brows”. And then there was the money. “Good Lord, the money.” I had to write three articles a year, typically 10,000 words long. For this, my peak salary was $498,141 – the equivalent of $166,000 per story. That’s “a good advance for an entire book”.

Carter’s new memoir, When the Going Was Good, reads like a “time capsule from a lost world”. The gossip is stellar but dated, with 1990s action hero Jean-Claude Van Damme “kicking down a door to free an editor”, and the columnist Peggy Noonan bumping knees with Princess Margaret, who wailed: “You’ve wounded me!” Carter himself has always had a “winning self-confidence”. He hired one assistant purely because he liked the way he walked, and once told me he could never trust a man with sunglasses perched on his head (“I haven’t risked it since”). Perhaps surprisingly, for a man who prizes antique canoes and Savile Row suits, he is also a master of “skewering pretensions”. If an assistant ever put him on hold when he was trying to call a movie studio chief, “he hung up, religiously”.

When the Going Was Good by Graydon Carter is available to pre-order here.

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