Writing Boots

The globe-trotting journalist Murray Sayle died last week, and a former colleague at The Guardian, Martin Woollacott, said of Sayle:

“He treated every story as a puzzle whose real meaning had to be drawn out from the cloud of clichés, simplifications, lies and misunderstandings with which others, including some of his colleagues, had enveloped it. He believed that within weeks, even days, of a big story developing, a received view emerged to which most journalists then unthinkingly conformed. Not he.”