Australian journalist Mark Baker has cited Waugh’s novel Scoop as one of the books that changed his life:
This peerless satire of the foibles and vanities of Fleet Street in the golden age of newspapers is as sharp and funny today as it was when it first appeared in the 1930s. I stumbled on to it early in my career in journalism and saw repeated echoes through many years as a foreign correspondent: the pompous, bumbling bosses, the big-noting and big-spending star reporters, the sycophantic editorial bureaucrats. It ought to be a standard text for journalism students of all ages.
The article appears in the Sydney Morning Herald and several other papers. Other life-changing books cited by Baker include Alan Moorehead’s Gallipoli, Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder and The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Australian novelist Richard Flanagan.
