On an early Monday evening in November Norman and Lesley made a rare trip to London together. The occasion was a birthday party at the Groucho Club for Martha Gellhorn, a few month younger than Norman. Both were now eighty-five. Lesley recalls that the dinner was "fascinating. Her coterie of young men [was there], John Simpson, Jon Snow, Nicholas Shakespeare, John Hatt. It was predominately a male occasion." Gellhorn had been asked, as had Norman, by the Daily Mail to write a piece about her best of all time travel book for its New Year's Day edition, and told him she had chosen Naples '44.