Journalism

Sarah Byrne is covering her first war and, after a slow start, things are finally picking up. Sweating in her flak jacket and undersized helmet, the twentysomething British freelancer is aiming for a scoop. One of her contacts might be persuaded to arrange a visit to ‘terror tunnels’, the headquarters of a Palestinian network whose activities Israel cites as justification for bombing Gaza City. Fed up with ‘monkey journalism’, Sarah wants to move on from recycling press releases to proper reporting. At the same time, she keeps asking herself what she is doing here. Do these people dragging bodies from under the rubble of their houses need yet another ‘misery merchant’ pestering them with trite questions?

It’s hard to classify this thought-provoking book – part memoir, part philosophical exploration, but mostly a deeply researched family history. And what a history that is. Tim Franks, born in 1968, has been a BBC reporter for almost two decades, and now presents Newshour on the World Service. So he knows how to tell stories about other people. But the events here concern himself, and many of them are heartbreaking, as he searches for an answer to the question of what comprises identity and to what extent we are products of our ancestors.

You know Mark Twain’s story. You’ve got no excuse not to; there have been so many biographies. Starting in the American South as Samuel Clemens, he took his pen name from the call of the Mississippi boatmen on reaching two fathoms. His lectures, followed by his travel pieces and novels, enchanted America and then the world. As a southerner, his principled stance against slavery gave him moral authority. The famous ‘Notice’ to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – ‘Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished’ – was swept aside, so that persons like H.L. Mencken could straightfacedly describe it as ‘the greatest novel ever written in English’.

In 2023 Natasha Brown published an article taking the reader behind the scenes of two interviews that she had given to newspapers in Australia and Spain while promoting her debut novel, Assembly. The point was to expose sleight of hand in the resulting write-ups, to say nothing of shabby conduct more generally. One interviewer, eager for her ‘to admit that I was influenced by two television shows which aired after my novel went to print’, asked, a propos of nothing, if she had a boyfriend. ‘It’s not clear whether this question came from the creased printout he regularly consults,’ wrote Brown, acidly.

Every government has its éminence grise.  The quiet, ruthless man (or occasional woman) operates in the shadows, only to be eventually outed when the boys and girls in the backroom fall out among themselves or when someone pens a memoir. Think Peter Mandelson, Nick Timothy, Fiona Hill and Dominic Cummings. The authors of Get In, both lobby journalists, have produced a detailed insider account of the rise of Keir Starmer, as seen through the eyes of those inhabitants of the political underworld whose names rarely surface in the public prints. In this case, the focus is on one alleged strategic genius, a man in his late forties with the memorable name of Morgan McSweeney, referred to throughout by the somewhat sinister moniker of ‘the Irishman’.

The travel writer Norman Lewis, the son of a Welsh psychic medium, died in Essex in 2003 at the age of 94. In his darkly comic autobiography, Jackdaw Cake, he relates how, in 1937, his mother built a spiritualist church in the north London suburb of Enfield as a sort of Taj Mahal memorial to her late husband (who was a retail pharmacist as well as a psychic). Enfield is not a likely pocket of the paranormal, but the Enfield Beacon of Light is still going strong. During its table-rapping and other spook-dabbling sessions no one is allowed to make jokes about striking a happy medium. Spiritualism is dead serious. Lewis’s humdrum upbringing in Edwardian Enfield – aspidistras, astral-planing – was far removed from the social privilege of most literary travellers.

No one should be put off reading Patrick Cockburn’s remarkable biography of his father by its misleading subtitle. ‘Guerrilla journalism’ doesn’t do justice to its subject. The suggestion of irregular warfare from the left underrates Claud Cockburn’s great accomplishments in mainstream politics and journalism and doesn’t begin to embrace the romantic and daring complexity of his life and career. By late 1931, his eyewitness reporting at the start of the Great Depression convinced him that Marx was right Indeed, it is the journalist son’s signal achievement to have surmounted left-wing cliché and written a fascinating and subtle portrait of a paradoxical career.