Fascinating exhibitions – clunky editorialising: Breaking the News at the British Library reviewed

In The Spectator office’s toilets there are framed front covers of the events that didn’t happen: Corbyn beats Boris; ‘Here’s Hillary’; Jeremy Hunt wins the Tory leadership contest. The British Library has something similar at its Breaking the News exhibition. The difference is that these ones actually made it to the newsstand. It’s enough to make any passing journalist break into a sweat.

‘Titanic sinks, no lives lost’, reported the Westminster Gazette in April 1912; ‘King Louis XVI dodges the guillotine’, we are told in the 1793 issue of the London Packet. The Sunday Times’s 1983 Hitler diaries hoax appears in this hall of infamy. So does ‘The Truth’, the Sun’s calamitous front cover in the days after the Hillsborough disaster.

News junkies will find plenty to enjoy here. For glum hacks worried about the death of print, there’s something reassuring about the timelessness of the stories on display. ‘Strange news out of Essex’, screams the front cover of one exhibit. A copy of today’s Daily Star? In fact, it’s a pamphlet from 1669 which tells the tale of a flying serpent terrorising people in Saffron Walden. Basildon on a Friday night can’t compete with that.

What about the story of the woman who gave birth to some rabbits? A headline on last week’s Sunday Sport? It’s actually a 300-year-old issue of Brice’s Weekly Journal. The paper splashes on Mary Toft, who fooled doctors with a yarn about her unusual offspring. As with many tabloid dramas, it had an unhappy ending: Toft was later locked up.

If the exhibits are fascinating, one bum note is the clunky editorialising. Lord Byron’s leaked poem from 1816 sits alongside the ‘Wagatha Christie’ tweets 200 years on.