course is what he should have been doing all this time. He should have been a professor or a man of letters or a lecturer - that was his calling.'

On The Lede waxes nostalgic. Black was almost the last of a dwindling species: 'The swashbuckling newspaper mogul. They used to loom large, the Northcliffes and Pulitzers and Hearsts, the Beaverbrooks and the Robert Maxwells, but with most newspapers in the English-speaking world now in more corporate hands, the Citizen-Kane types are getting ever scarcer'.
Theo Hobson