Towards the End of the Morning

"This book is often recalled for a very famous portrait of lunchtime seen from a Fleet Street window. Everybody’s going out for lunch. The literary editor and the foreign editor are going off to the Garrick by taxi, the subs are going off on foot to the cafe, the advertising bosses on a stroll to El Vino. And then: “The editor shuffled out, unnoticed by anyone, and caught a number 15 bus to the Athenaeum.” The editor is totally invisible in Frayn’s account of rivalry between the “old lads” and the “young turks” in what was then the new age of TV and celebrity. The beauty of the Frayn account is the invisibility of the editor, which in some respects is probably the best model of all. Well… no. Not the bus. But there weren’t many going past Wapping…"

"I’m afraid not. My second book is Towards the End of the Morning , by Michael Frayn. It is said to be based on Frayn’s experience of working at The Observer in the 1960s, though it smells a bit more like the old Telegraph to me. You will forgive me another quotation, but there is no point in trying to paraphrase the qualities of a book like this, when the job can be so much better done in the author’s own words: ‘Various members of the staff emerged from Hand and Ball Passage during the last dark hour of the morning, walked with an air of sober responsibility towards the main entrance, greeted the commissionaire and vanished upstairs in the lift to telephone their friends and draw their expenses before going out again to have lunch.’ All Fleet Street life is there, at least until the mid-1980s. I don’t want to think about it. Can we dawdle for a while in the 1970s?"