You can’t put it down

Fintan O’Toole

• The Fourth Estate by Jeffrey Archer
  HarperCollins, 550 pp, £16.99, May 1996, ISBN 0 00 225318 6
• Tickle the Public: One Hundred Years of the Popular Press by Matthew Engel
  Gollancz, 352 pp, £20.00, April 1996, ISBN 0 575 06143 X
• Newspaper Power: The New National Press in Britain by Jeremy Tunstall
  Oxford, 441 pp, £35.00, March 1996, ISBN 0 19 871133 6

Lay aside for a moment your self-esteem and imagine that you are Jeffrey Archer. You are now a model citizen of the Post-Modern state of hyper-reality, a figure in whom actuality and invention, public fact and private fantasy, the business of government and the spinning of yarns have become utterly indistinguishable. You have made up key aspects of your own biography and seen them reported as fact in the newspapers. You have seen how a man of limited intelligence but breathtaking cheek can be transported, thanks to a handful of dreary novels, into the realms of high politics, as deputy chairman of the ruling party of a major European state. And you have been, most unjustly, at the receiving end of the News of the World and the Star, who published libellous stories about your contacts with a prostitute.