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“... In the early summer of 1981 a string of riots burned up and down Britain like Armada beacons. Brixton resembled post-Blitz London. Whole areas of Manchester, Preston, Wolverhampton and Hull were reduced to rubble and glass. In July, Liverpool lit up in a haze of flame and CS gas. Shortly afterwards Manchester erupted once again. The Home Secretary at the time was William Whitelaw ...”

“... It invented atrocity stories, manufactured interviews, published fake pictures, perverted real incidents. It conducted the most sustained campaign of jingoism in the history of its country. When a battleship was sunk it shrieked: ‘War Sure.’ By the time hostilities commenced in April the paper’s streamer headlines were five and a half inches high ...”

“... Until supper time on Thursday, 14 October, when Miss Sara Keays lifted her telephone to summon the Times to her drawing-room, a mere four people in public life had openly censured Mr Cecil Parkinson and suggested he should resign: two Tory MPs, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and the Mayor of Potters Bar. Ranged against this lone and motley quartet were the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, the Chairman of the Conservative Party, most of Fleet Street, 70 Tory MPs, 62 per cent of the British public, Bernard Levin, 90 per cent of telephone callers to Conservative Central Office and a briefcase full of letters from Mr Parkinson’s constituents ...”

“... in a clapped-out language of description, a variety of flat American academic prose or, in Alan Rusbridger’s case, of tedious schoolboy prurience. This makes Rusbridger’s non-event of a book easily forgotten. In the case of William Eberhard and Bettyann Kevles, the sense of linguistic imprisonment is more ...”

“... In Moscow, where I was living at the time (employed by the Guardian, as it happens, the paper Alan Rusbridger edited from 1995 to 2015), dawn comes early in summer and it was hot outside, though the city was asleep.* I switched on the computer I’d recently bought and connected to the internet. Once the screech of the dial-up had subsided and the ...”

“... such a law would be to create a legal fiction that would not always reflect reality. Consider R (Rusbridger) v. Attorney General. The former editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger sought a declaration that s.3 of the Treason Felony Act 1848, which criminalises the advocacy of republicanism, contravenes the right of ...”

“... while the source is cool and inscrutable. Snowden later told the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, that if ‘I end up in chains in Guantánamo Bay … I can live with it’. Greenwald is a former constitutional and human rights lawyer, and now a journalist who isn’t afraid to point the finger at the conventional and the ...”

“... In some parallel universe I like to think that Max Hastings and Paul Dacre and John Witherow and Alan Rusbridger behave like this. Dominic Lawson may well have said to Charles Moore in some gentleman’s outfitters what Sharon says to Georgina: ‘Well, we can’t both buy this, can we, babe? And I know who looks best in it.’ Both women, you see, are ...”

“... got such gossip that you feel obliged to hand over your own, however thin. He once said that Alan Rusbridger hired him to come to London because the Guardian was struggling to get any of their reporters into the Conservatives’ parties – how was the left to know what the right was thinking? Michael has no special affection for the New Yorker, he ...”

“... she would surely be more open to the ‘new politics’ than the paper would have been under Alan Rusbridger. It hasn’t worked out that way. What started with denial, as the unions and constituency Labour Parties came out for Corbyn and people registered as supporters in their tens of thousands, soon turned to horror, and finally to stunned ...”

“... littered the tables; there were takeaway cups and other detritus.’ Into this fervid scene steps Alan Rusbridger, the editor in chief, fresh off the plane from London. Somebody knocks over a cappuccino. This is a gift to Rusbridger, who grabs a newspaper to clear up the mess and says: ‘We are literally wiping the ...”

“... opposition. On hearing that the Guardian was being sued for libel by Jonathan Aitken, its editor, Alan Rusbridger, remarked: ‘We’d better get Carman before Aitken does.’ But Carman QC was never a libel expert and, like other converts to this specialist area of law, relied on a succession of talented juniors to do the academic preparation for ...”

“... in this vice,’ he says. ‘When I once rehearsed the Schubert Octet with the clarinettist Alan Rusbridger, he remarked to me at one point: “Professor” – he is a journalist by trade so this form of address is not entirely a compliment …’ Two pages on the 1900 Paris Expo skip on to three on Georg Simmel, then somehow Saint-Just and Marx ...”

“... It’s worth taking a moment to wonder if that would matter. At the moment, to borrow the analysis Alan Rusbridger offered in a long blog post, the media landscape is divided into three main players. 1. The press. 2. The big public broadcasters. 3. The new media, which are lively, chaotic, decentralised, prone to fads and crazes, and are opening up access ...”

“... or nescience, or because we’re thinking about other things. In 2013, at the behest of Alan Rusbridger, I spent a week reading the Snowden papers that the Guardian had to destroy in the UK but kept a copy of in New York. They provided a striking portrait of the security services’ attitudes to the huge boon given them by new technology. After ...”