Newspapers and reviews have a great deal in common with individuals. Like men and women they have their peculiar characteristics, their different points of view, their private opinions; they have their dreams and ambitions, hopes and fears. They pass through moods and phases, have growing-pains, succeed or fail in the business of their life.

A great opportunity is waiting for someone to write the biography of any paper. It would be a very human document. If the writer were smitten with the modern craze, he could write it from a psychological standpoint, and reveal to the world the hitherto unguessed complexes that were responsible for its success or failure. He could describe how, while still in swaddling clothes, it was thrown to the critics for their cruel dissection, and how its hyper-sensitive nature never really survived that painful ordeal, with the result that all through its life it showed signs of agoraphobia, and was of such a retiring disposition that if anybody made a noise like a critic, it raised not even a still, small voice in self-defence, and ultimately allowed itself to be submerged into utter silence That would serve as the pathetic life-story of one type of paper. A great deal could be made of the last time it went to press, to emerge unwanted, never to be read.

But the reverse of this might be true. In that case the biography would begin with the paper waking up for the first time in print and finding itself famous. It had the great will to succeed, knew its own mind, and rode rough-shod over the faces of its critics. It did not even know there was such a thing as an inferiority complex, or desire that must be repressed and sublimated into something else.