Journalism

Anyone who thinks that a stable and loving family background is the key to a happy life had better read this book; for its protagonist, now 80 years old, was rejected as a baby by his unmarried mother, looked after by a doting and doted-on grandmother until he was four, and then, inexplicably (given that he had various relations who could have cared for him), consigned to an orphanage of Dickensian grimness from which he was finally discharged at the age of 14 with nothing but a Bible, a new suit, and a ten-shilling note. Yet Peter Paterson’s fascinating memoir shows him to have led a life of almost unnatural

Some travel writers, in an attempt to simulate the hardship of Victorian journeys, like to impose artificial difficulties on themselves. A glut of memorably foolish yarns with titles like Hang-Gliding to Borneo or To Bognor on a Rhinoceros discredited the genre in the 1980s. In every case it would have been quicker for the authors to take the train. Why wind-surf across the Mojave when there’s a serviceable coach service? Tim Butcher, formerly a Telegraph war correspondent, is biased towards old- fashioned travellers in the Redmond O’Hanlon mould who, with their bushy side-whiskers and squire-naturalist curiosity, continue a tradition of Victorian exploration. His best-selling Africa adventure, Blood River, followed in

Frank Johnson, the finest and funniest parliamentary sketch-writer of his generation died, too young, in late 2006. His widow, Virginia Fraser, has now compiled and edited a selection of his writings. It is mostly about domestic politics as seen from his seat in the press gallery of the House of Commons, interspersed with expeditions to by-elections and general elections. There are also pieces on his early life in Shoreditch, his lifelong enthusiasms — opera, ballet, warfare, diplomacy — and at the end of his life, his newly acquired house near Montpellier. In a work of this kind it is a temptation to review the man and not the book. I

It’s odd that a writer as excellent and long-established as Ian Jack hasn’t ever written an actual book but has stuck doggedly to the humble trade of journalism, of which this volume is a collection. It’s odd that a writer as excellent and long-established as Ian Jack hasn’t ever written an actual book but has stuck doggedly to the humble trade of journalism, of which this volume is a collection. The reason may be that since what he called ‘perhaps the best Sunday morning of my life’, the day in 1970 when Harold Evans offered him a job as a sub-editor on the Sunday Times, journalism has remained his first

Journalists’ memoirs tend to be as transitory as the great stories they so lovingly recall. Journalists’ memoirs tend to be as transitory as the great stories they so lovingly recall. Even the best of them — Arthur Christiansen’s Headlines All My Life, Otto Friedrich’s Decline and Fall, about the death of the Saturday Evening Post, Murray Sayle’s A Crooked Sixpence, recalling Soho gangs and press corruption — seem dated now, the scoops forgotten, the scandals long past. Few of them impart much of value, except perhaps for a fleeting sense of nostalgia. Harold Evans must surely be counted an exception, because, for more than a decade, he ran the best

Lynn Barber’s interviews are one of the main reasons to subscribe to the Observer: on any Sunday when a piece of hers appears, it’s always the first thing to turn to, even — or make that especially — when she’s profiling someone unsympathetic. Not for nothing has she earned the nickname the Demon Barber. On John Prescott, for example: ‘You wouldn’t want to invite Prezza to dinner, not because he might eat peas off his knife, but because he’d bore the other guests to death.’ What makes Barber such an unfailingly enjoyable read is that she makes her own judgments about people, which means she often likes monsters or disdains