Tabloid newspapers often provoke a jaundiced response from the British public. This is by no means a new phenomenon. As J.B. Priestley memorably described in Out of the People (1941), in the 1940s, “The Newspaper that tries to make its readers more intelligent is replaced by the newspaper that flatters the idiocy of its readers” (22). Yet historians have long ago developed a more nuanced appreciation of the tabloid press (popular press is usually the preferred academic term) as a reflection of the people, the same “People” that Priestley valorized: their political preferences, cultural habits, and everyday preoccupations. Terry Kirby's work adds to a growing canon of works that have charted the development of the popular press in modern Britain, although, as an advocate of press regulation and pluralism of ownership, we can imagine what Priestley's reaction might have been.

Kirby, though, is a more fair-minded observer with an obviously cherished connection to the work and social value of journalists (he was a founder member of the Independent's staff when it was launched in the 1980s). For the “newsmongers” of the tabloid press, there is a distinct admiration even as he charts the more deplorable antics that often blemish the industry's reputation. His inference is that they are the inheritors of a rich tradition in the evolution of print culture; indeed, this is where Newsmongers begins with a whistlestop and slightly idiosyncratic survey of the development of the printed word. At one point, the Bayeux Tapestry is even memorably, if rather anachronistically, described as “the first graphic novel” (14).

The benefit of this potted history is hard to ascertain. In actuality, the focus of Newsmongers is on Britain in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and with a bias toward the latter part of this period. There are also occasional tangents to consider tabloid journalism in the United States—“yellow journalism” (or the “new journalism,” both contemporary terms, but the latter usually favored by scholars) as personified by the competing media empires of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. The American dimension periodically ebbs and flows, culminating with a brief comment on Donald Trump's first presidential campaign at the end of the book, though never redounding to much advantage in terms of either narrative or analysis.

The more compelling chapters of Newsmongers address the inter-war period, the golden age of the tabloid newspaper, when mass-circulation dailies dominated the media landscape, and when press barons attempted to shape political agendas and topple prime ministers (a predilection they have never quite shaken). In part this is rose-tinted, and here Kirby and I would probably both plead guilty, but there is also a pronounced sense of difference; why, for example, the relationship between the Prince of Wales—the future Edward VIII—and Wallis Simpson was studiously overlooked until the Daily Mirror broke the unofficial omerta, and how the popular press evolved nuanced positions on the appeasement (or otherwise) of Hitler's Germany. This inevitably prompts the reader to question how the century ended with Page 3 in the Sun or the Mirror's front page yelling “Achtung Surrender!” about England's German opponents during the Euro 96 football tournament.

It would have been helpful if the conclusion to Newsmongers actually underlined Kirby's framing for the evolution of the tabloid press. If readers are invited to imagine a through-line of proprietors from Lords Northcliffe to Beaverbrook to Rothermere, culminating more contemporaneously with Rupert Murdoch—and this is undoubtedly the implication—then it would have been more constructive for Kirby to reinforce this argument rather than leaving the book to drift toward an indeterminate end via fragmented updates about recent press scandals; the so-called “Wagatha Christie” case, or Jeremy Clarkson's defamation of Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex. Indeed, Newsmongers' final words are left to Markle's husband, the Duke of Sussex, castigating the negative role of the tabloids as part of his own legal action against various newspapers. If recent editors such as Kelvin Mackenzie or Paul Dacre are the heirs to Arthur Christiansen, H.G. Bartholomew and Hugh Cudlipp, it would have been useful to summarize how this might have been so even as the tabloids careered toward the very different world of digitization and apparent (though often overplayed) popular discontent with their role in contemporary society, a malign role as Prince Harry, as with Priestley before him, have claimed.

Such a top-down framing rather ill-serves the historical value of the popular press. Newsmongers may be accessible to a wider audience, but Kirby's approach is siloed, producing an institutional history rather than something that places popular newspapers in a wider public context. In this respect, it cannot hope to have the resonance of other works by the likes of Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy (Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present [2015]) or the work of Kevin Williams (Read All About It! A History of the British Newspaper [2010]). What Kirby does achieve, whether intentional or not, is to evoke the world of the tabloid newspaper: “Planet Tabloid” as he terms it, a world brimming with machismo, arrogance and often cartoonish hyperbole; a world still just about clinging to nobility of purpose, that brings alive the quotidian preoccupations of the people at large even as it has become mired in scandal and dwindling circulations. What does the future hold? Kirby is again slightly reticent to offer a more definite prediction, but Newsmongers at least shows the reader how, over a span of 125 years, we have arrived at our current juncture.