Like all good journalists, my friend and former Observer colleague Peter Avis delighted in mischief-making. Never more so than when, as the London correspondent of the leftwing French daily L'Humanité, he was firing barbed questions at prime minister Margaret Thatcher during European summit press conferences. On one occasion she was so irritated that she referred to him afterwards as "that awful Frenchman". Peter, a wonderfully eccentric Englishman and Francophile, dined out on that for years.
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