 He later discovered a colleague and close friend, Jackie Moore, had died in the fire with two others.To aid his recovery from the trauma McDowell returned to Northumberland and rented a holiday cottage with a view of Lindisfarne, where he would spend the next three winters there writing, first "A Woman of Style" and then "A Woman of Spirit".He has said that his proudest moment during his spell with "The Sunday Times" was when the designer Giorgio Armani threatened to pull his advertising from the paper (at £50,000 a page) because McDowell had given one of his shows a bad review.