John Lanchester writes:

So Brown and briefing are the two big things missing from the Diaries. There are two big things to compensate for those omissions, and the first of them is the level of comic, anecdotal and personal detail. There is a large irony here, in that Campbell spent a great deal of time and rage attacking the modern media for its emphasis on personalities, gossip and process, and has now written a 350,000 word book concentrating on exactly those things. Never mind. There is some real comedy in the diary. Sometimes it is inadvertent and Pooterish: 'GB called and we agreed God was a disaster area'; 'The fall of Milosevic, which was brilliant.'

(LRB 16 August 2007)

Arrow | hardback 794 pp. |ISBN: 9780091796297