His vision of the Statesman was as a totally independent, and therefore fearless, mischief-maker. Sometimes this worked - the magazine's anti-Iraq wa… - Peter Wilby

They [Jews] no longer routinely suffer gross or violent discrimination; indeed, in the US and Europe at least, Jews today are probably safer than most minorities.

Unearthing journalists' faulty predictions and poor judgements is always enjoyable. To my delight, I once discovered that the Sun, in a fawning interview in 1973, described Gary Glitter (later imprisoned for sexual offences against children) as "the rock’n’roll daddy who makes little girls ask to see more of his hairy chest". So before anybody else finds out, I will reveal that, during my editorship, the NS ran an article under the headline "Max Clifford is a nice chap shock". We reported that Clifford, who has just been convicted of sexually abusing four girls, was a man of "private modesty . . . committed to public service" whose "personal life has been a paragon of virtue". Since this was in 2000, we don't even have the excuse that it was the 1970s.

[Y]ou may be sure that, if the Soviet Union were still a reality and a threat, the debt crisis, which now affects some 50 countries and has reached previously unimagined levels (some countries have to use a quarter of their export earnings to service debt), would not exist.