Charles Glass in LRB: ‘The epoch of celebrated reporter-spies had, however, ended ten years before my initiation into the scribbling confraternity: in January 1963, Kim Philby, then correspondent for the Observer and the Economist as well as the Kremlin’s top agent in British intelligence, defected on a freighter from Beirut harbour to Moscow. It was in the elegant surroundings of the Saint Georges that Philby had entertained his mistress, thus declaring to surprised colleagues his liaison with the wife of (…) the New York Times’s man in Beirut, Sam Pope Brewer.’

Also: ‘The only qualities essential for real success in journalism are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability.’

Those were the days.

Glass: ‘Worse, most of their potential readers and viewers prefer the flashing slide show of social media.’

The heydays of journalism are over; the heydays of war and mistresses, especially in Lebanon, never stopped.

(a sf 2111)