Remembering my friend Claus von Bülow

There is a paperback on my bookshelves with an inscription from Claus von Bulow, who died this week. ‘To Damian,’ it reads, ‘who is also quite innocent.’ The title of the book? Insulin Murders.

This may surprise anyone old enough to remember the tragedy and the two trials that made Claus notorious in the early 1980s. He was, after all, eventually acquitted of trying to murder his socialite wife Sunny by injecting her with insulin in her Newport mansion, plunging her into a decades-long coma that ended only with her death.

But that title is misleading. The chapter devoted to Claus von Bulow, written by Prof Vincent Marks, a world expert on hypoglycaemia, concludes that the coma was not caused by insulin. Therefore no attempted murder took place. It supports the evidence, assembled by Alan Dershowitz at the second trial, that Claus – a toweringly handsome Dane who told sardonic anecdotes in a cultivated English accent – was framed.

Claus was my friend for nearly 20 years.