I finished college at twenty-two. I was going to do six months training on Fleet Street, which was the mecca of competitive journalism. I sat in on the Daily Express, and I enjoyed it so much, I thought, I gotta have a job here, just to learn.

And I did that for four or five months. It was one of the happiest experiences of my life. I was living in a friend’s sitting room in London – which in those days was filthy from the pollution – and watching the editor and learning to be a journalist.

There was paper rationing in Britain in those days, and they couldn’t produce more than an eight-page broadsheet. And they treated every day like it was life-or-death competition.

They would put up a one-page critique of the paper every day. “We had 156 stories today, and the Daily Mail had 164. Never let that happen again.”

Everything was boiled down to two paragraphs or so. Brevity was important. Facts had to be right. And it was exciting.

As a journalist, you felt as if you were right at the centre of events. [Esquire]