Unfortunately for this volume commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Daily Telegraph, most people today are keener to read about the paper’s somewhat scandalous recent experiences and mysteriously uncertain future — about which it has nothing to say — than about its long and worthy past. So the timing of this chatty and jolly tome could not be worse. It is rather as if the Cunard company had brought out a comparably lightweight volume shortly after the sinking of the Titanic.
That said, the book has much to commend it, in the form of eye-catching extracts from the paper, starting with the Hyde Park riots of 1855 and ending, as far as I can make out, with a piece by A. N. Wilson, written in 2003, about high camp Anglican priests at an Oxford theological college. Surprisingly there is also quite a lot of saucy stuff in the Victorian extracts as well. In short the book makes for agreeable browsing, if you enjoy that sort of thing. How could it be otherwise? A newspaper would have to be very dull indeed if, out of issues covering 150 years, it could not produce a galaxy of striking pictures and amusing despatches.
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