The harbor was steeped in Sabbath stillness as they came in on the morning tide”); a talent for the pithy first line (a story about a blind man who fell to his death in the subway began “The sixth sense that had preserved Oscar England from harm through the thirty-four dark years of his life betrayed him yesterday.”; and a breath-taking efficiency (when a crazed former soldier shot 13 people and himself in New Jersey, he retraced the gunman’s steps for six hours, interviewing nearly 50 witnesses, and then, in less than three hours, wrote a 4,000-word account for the first edition, not a word of which was changed.) The story won him the Pulitzer Prize, and he duly gave the $1,000 prize money to the dead killer’s mother.So far, you may have noticed, no Brits, and therein lies a problem. Unfortunately, we were converted to Satanism.” Neither do I want to do without A J Liebling, chronicler of wars and low-life for The New Yorker. He it was who, when asked how he rated himself, replied: “I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.” But my favourite is not a man who wrote gags, or covered great events, but who reported everyday events in his city. His name was Meyer Berger, and for 30 years he occupied a desk in the middle of The New York Times newsroom, from which he went out to cover crimes, heatwaves, animals escaping from circuses, funerals, festivals and fires. He did so with a skill for phrase (his report of soldiers’ bodies returning in 1947 began: “The first war dead from Europe came home yesterday. She, the first reporter into Dachau, was the ultimate story getter, and had not the slightest scruple about begging, borrowing, stealing, or even seducing to do it. She was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting.I’ll also need a couple of good hogwash-spotters.

Step forward P J O’Rourke of Rolling Stone, writer of one of the neatest first paragraphs I know: “My friend Dorothy and I spent a weekend at Heritage USA, the born-again Christian resort and amusement park created by television evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker Dorothy and I came to scoff – but went away converted. For the past six months, I have been playing God; or, at least, as near to God as any journalist is likely to get. And the question is, are women going to relate to all this in some deep pulsing elemental core of their being and adopt 3-pay as something that feels like them, or will they reject Arty Anna and the brand along with her?. I have appointed myself editor of The Paradise Times, and have been busily selecting my staff from among every journalist who ever lived. What she’s actually doing is demonstrating the financial virtues of 3’s pay-as-you-go offer, through the homely medium of breadsticks: “Say you’re a breadstick and you want to talk to a glass of wine, or the vinegar … And the vinegar couldn’t talk to the cake…” The sensible male voiceover cuts in here to tell you that some naughty pay-as-you-go suppliers could be charging you 40p a minute when they had to negotiate between vinegar and cakes, whereas 3-pay only charges you 5p a minute for voice-calls.Meanwhile Anna’s started saying the things crazed people do, like “did I just say that?” or “am I making any sense at all?” and you’re expecting her to burst into tears The diners are looking deeply embarrassed. It’s got a feature wall of random stone, it’s got bright colour The tables are configured in a non-geometric way There’s not a taupe leather wall in sight Everything’s like an old film.

She’s moving between the tables in a bright red off-the-shoulder dress with hair pulled back and dangly earrings like the woman, four glasses of chardonnay to the wind, who suddenly decides to tell the world her boyfriend’s a bastard. Has she made a mistake? Have they – the 3 network – made a mistake? Or have they absolutely thought the whole thing through?It’s a deeply whimsical, nice-looking, high-budget campaign, presumably targeted at women, with the idea that all the macho arguments about mobile phonology can be better explained in chick-literary fashion, with some aloe vera ideas about evolution – and breadsticks Breadsticks star in the latest treatment. She’s in a restaurant whose decoration is either inspired or unutterably naff, but completely unlike the ruling conventions of smart-ish London restaurant design. And then the trail went cold.
And now she’s in a mobile phone campaign. She was at that point where you were thinking, “What next?” because she seemed to have a sort of unfocussed power of personality and she’s very pretty in an evolved unsoapy way. And after that – I don’t have the chapter and verse but one gets an impression – she became rather smart and Southern and even a bit NY-Lon. If you told me she was a part-time member of Miss Moss’s gang of international lady tearaways I’d believe you.