The Spike

"Yes. Instead of describing high politics, the prime minister on the phone, proprietors breathing down your neck and all that tends to make up the caricature notion, he talks about the problems between the editor’s secretary and the secretary in the sports department, and the problems of having too many lunches in the same week with people you don’t need to have lunch with, and how easy it is to waste your time. He talks about primadonnas on the brink of resignation, and how lawyers and diarists have different standards of truth… “It’s always possible to forget the effect of what you are writing on the people you are writing about.” It’s not a great novel. To some extent it’s a novel of management with a romantic plot, but it does at least attempt to deal with the personal aspects of editing a newspaper. It’s a kind of cautionary tale. It’s got a wonderful opening line: “He eased himself into the chair behind the big desk and thought, ‘Well now it will be different’.” Now he was editor! And it describes all the things he thought he would do before he became the editor, and how they would be done. And the things that stop him doing all these things are not big things. They’re all the little things that I can recall so well. It is one book which describes the experience from the inside. Most of the books about newspaper editors tell it from the outside, from the point of view of people who are critical – of which Trollope’s is one of the most famous."