Gossip blogs have a poor sense of history. The writers are too young to have accumulated much background information; turnover is too rapid for institutional knowledge to build up; and nobody has enough time to search the archives let alone dig into the bibliography. (And who cares which old people shagged eachother in the 20th century?) But the amnesiac blogs are missing out on some delightful sidenotes. For instance, former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown dated both novelist Martin Amis (kudos!) and dead comic Dudley Moore (hunh?) while she was still at university-according to Judy Bachrach's biography of the celebrity editor and her husband, which I'm just reading. That inspired me to put together a gallery of the most unlikely couplings among media personalities. Your suggestions in the comments or in email, please! After the jump, what Tina Brown thought of the Arthur star in bed.

Within a year, the comedian Dudley Moore, then at the height of his fame and career, came courting at St. Anne's in his limousine, much to the amazement of Tina's classmates... Martin Amis, the son of another famous novelist, Kingsley Amis, followed suit. None of these conquests-with the exception of Amis-did she hold in awe. Privately, a few of them would become the objects of a coolly detached amusement. Later confidants claimed to have been informed by Tina that Dudley Moore, despite his attractions, had one leg shorter than the other; that Auberon Waugh washed frequently after sex.



[Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power-by Judy Bachrach]