[W]hat shocked me was the creeping realisation that he had used his position as an editor and columnist to create what the writer Beatrix Campbell ha… - Peter Wilby

Wilby argued for "nuance" in these matters, while denigrating those who dared complain of abuse. There was nothing nuanced in the material Wilby collected and created over his career – they were crime scene photographs of our most vulnerable children being raped for his pleasure.

When I read last week that the Press Complaints Commission had censured FHM magazine for printing a photograph of a topless 14-year-old girl, I looked to the press for coverage and comment. Surely, I thought, newspapers that are so determined to root out "evil" paedophiles and to denounce "pervs" who view child pornography would have something to say. ... There was not a word, for example, in the Sun, whose editor, Rebekah Wade, has always been such a sturdy opponent of paedophilia. That wouldn't be - would it? - because the red-tops fear they might themselves be caught out one day.

The death of the Soviet Union also deprived the global poor of something more intangible: not exactly hope, perhaps, but the sense of an alternative, of possibility.