Making the running

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 newspaper in the world. The Sunday Times, in the 1970s, was good because it placed journalism at the heart of the paper, and allowed it free rein. It had no obvious political axe to grind, was unimpeded by an overbearing proprietor, and was served by an editorial team which was second to none; it is to Evans’s credit that he loses no opportunity to pay tribute to the talent he inherited and recruited. They would never have flourished, however, without his demonic energy and his sometimes uncontrolled enthusiasm; he was never a man to give two spreads to a story when four would do. ‘A newspaper is an argument on the way to a deadline,’ he writes, and he seemed always up against one; my memory of him is of someone permanently on the run, crouched forward to get to the next front page quicker, changing his mind at the last minute. He did not always get it right. ‘My ambition got the better of my judgment,’ he says at one stage, in mid-narrative.