Home > Work > The Question (Morland Dynasty, #25)
1 " The Yorkshire was something of a landmark, and facing it across the river was another, Botterill’s Horse Repository, a startling and ornate building in red and yellow brick. Here the gentlemen who rode or drove into York could leave their horses. The stalls were arranged on several storeys, with ramps leading up from floor to floor – the equine equivalent, Teddy supposed, of one of those new blocks of ‘flats’ one heard about in London – and if York grew any more crowded, they would all end up living on top of each other, like the horses, he thought. "
― Cynthia Harrod-Eagles , The Question (Morland Dynasty, #25)
2 " Of course one has to give diplomacy a chance, but it would be better for us, if we are going to have to fight them, for the Cabinet to start now before the Boers are ready for us.’ ‘Well, public opinion is all for war, for what that’s worth.’ ‘The Cabinet would never be swayed by public opinion.’ ‘Perhaps not, but with that dreadful newspaper whipping people up into a blood lust, we shall have demonstrations in the street before long if we don’t go to war.’ ‘Dreadful newspaper? You mean the Daily Mail, I conclude?’ ‘It shouldn’t even be called a newspaper!’ Charlotte said wrathfully. ‘It doesn’t report the news at all, it – it makes it up! "
3 " Instead, the Daily Mail’s editor picked out only the ‘brightest’ items of news, digested them, and rewrote them so as to turn them into ‘stories’. These always had to be short, strongly prejudiced in some direction, and either sentimental or sensational. The headlines were calculated to provoke, rather than merely to suggest what the paragraph was about; scandals and crime figured largely in its pages, and for preference there must always be some figure of hatred set up like a guy to be knocked down. It was a whole new concept of journalism, and it had met with severe disapproval from the penny broadsheets and those who read them. The idea was not to inform but to entertain, to tickle the palate and play on the prejudices of the domestic servant and the junior clerk, of that whole mass of the "