It is the custom to deride the journalist as a writer of vulgarian English and a debaser of our noble mother tongue. ‘Journalese’ is the contemptuous term often applied to his style in prose. At best his utterances are regarded as sparrow’s twitterings compared with the classic notes of the authentic songsters of literature. Yet everyone reads him, even those who scoff: and numerous scholars, professors and pedants find newspapers a necessity. At his worst the journalist can be very bad; but at his best, he can reach the heights. Our own time, which might easily be labelled the Age of Print, has given the journalist his opportunity. By means of rapid machine-printing he can gain the ears of the world and, if he has something to say and a way of saying it, he can command a hearing and wield an influence that any teacher or preacher might envy.

In the very front rank of the few who have given us journalism at its best is Sir Philip Gibbs. He has had the rare gift of using to the full every opportunity that fortune threw in his way or that his own audacity could snatch. In his latest book, Adventures in Journalism he tells in his vivid and lucid way the experiences of a spectator of the world, an on-looker with a pen swiftly chronicling life’s enterprises, its pageantry, its follies, its humour, its crimes, its wars—all the medley that makes it so complex a patchwork of mad mystery. To have lived amid varied incident and stirring event is one thing : it is quite another to make them living and articulate on a printed page.