This is how to do journalism

Mark Amory, the Spectator’s literary editor for so many years he can’t remember – could be 25, could be nearly 30, he says – bids farewell in this week’s Diary. Best books pages in the world if you ask me. Quote unquote:

In the early Eighties then, when Alexander Chancellor had reinvented the magazine after a bad patch, and it seemed daring, anarchic and slightly amateurish, I wrote theatre reviews and one late afternoon went round to Doughty Street, where the Spectator then was. I could find no one sober in the building. How did it manage to come out so promptly each week?