The Hacks Book Club

**Ian Hislop** (0:00)
Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

**Andrew Hunter Murray** (0:03)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94 My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here in the iStudio with Helen Lewis, Ian Hislop, and Adam McQueen. This is your summer special. Very exciting. It's silly season.
There'll be no news on, so we thought we'd record a special episode.

**Adam McQueen** (0:19)
Domestic.

**Andrew Hunter Murray** (0:21)
With some beach reading for you.
And we did an episode last year which was all about political memoirs and the best political memoirs there ever were. And this time we thought, well, Private Eye, let's talk about journalism. So we're going to suggest some of the best books about journalism that have ever been written, starting with Ian. We've each chosen a couple of books basically. So Ian, what's your first choice?

**Ian Hislop** (0:42)
My first choice is The Faber Book of Reportage, edited by Professor John Carey. As you can imagine, it's a big beach read. As you wander along the front, you'll see almost everyone reading it on their deck chairs. But don't be put off.
It is a brilliant collection of eyewitness accounts of reportage from a couple of 100 BC till now. So it's got top hacks like Thucydides and pieces about the death of Socrates. This is in the early section. It goes all the way up, but it is absolutely extraordinary. It's first person news. It's a survivor from the Titanic. It's someone describing the charge of the Light Brigade, the Spanish conquest of Mexico, a written account from one of the soldiers. It's the most extraordinary, I think, collection of stuff. I'm making it sound very heavy on wars and disasters, and there's a lot of that. But he's actually got some very odd, strange pieces about ordinary human activity, about crops, about food, about the way people dress. And it's beautifully put together, but it's all framed because Carey is a great critic and analyst. And he said that with the end of religion as a shared narrative, what people have moved towards is current events, world events as something that can be shared. And it's a very convincing, it's a very, very good preface apart from anything else. But it's very upbeat about journalism, which not all of the books.
My other choice is very rude about journalism, but we can get on to that later. But he actually says in the introduction that reportage, this wave of confronting reality, prevents people escaping reality. It reminds people what is actually happening. And he says it changes its readers, it educates their sympathies, and it limits their capacity for the inhuman.
You get everything, you get the Holocaust, you get all of it inside this collection. And it's very uplifting.

**Helen Lewis** (2:54)
Growing up, did you have a piece of journalism that made you want to become a journalist?

**Ian Hislop** (2:58)
That's a really good question.

**Helen Lewis** (3:00)
But what did you grow up reading?

**Ian Hislop** (3:02)
A lot of fiction.

**Helen Lewis** (3:03)
Right.

**Adam McQueen** (3:06)
Was there a family paper? Did your mum and dad take a particular paper?

**Ian Hislop** (3:09)
Well, we lived abroad a lot. I'm in the South China Morning Post, because I read a lot of it. For a while, we're in Hong Kong.
I don't remember the newspapers in either Kuwait, Saudi or Nigeria, but I'm sure they were there. But at school, as soon as I was sent back to school in England, the school had a row of wooden lectins with all the papers laid out. I mean, this is prep school onwards.

**Adam McQueen** (3:34)
All the papers, tabloids as well, the whole lot.

**Ian Hislop** (3:36)
Don't be ridiculous.

**Andrew Hunter Murray** (3:38)
What sort of school do you think this was?

**Adam McQueen** (3:39)
The papers they wanted the boys reading, yes.

**Ian Hislop** (3:41)
So there was The Times, The Telegraph and The Manchester Guardian, as it probably was when I was in school. So no, I remember the thrill of reading papers very, very early. I think why I love this book so much, I keep giving it to young relatives and people who are going into journalism saying, this is just about being there and reporting what happened as opposed to your take on it or how you feel about it or it's a genuine curiosity about the world and how it is.

**Andrew Hunter Murray** (4:11)
Yeah. And it's that kind of that theory of journalism. I think this might be in, is it Nick Davies' Flat Earth News? The idea there is a sort of core iron ball of actual event. And then you get people who were at the event and that's the closest you can possibly get. That is the first proper version of news. Then you get the analysis. Then you get another layer. And then eventually you get…