According to Private Eye, executives at the Daily Mail were alarmed by the impending publication of Adrian Addison’s new history of the paper. They expected an onslaught. So their hearts must have sunk when they saw the cover of Mail Men. Stephen Fry, who may hate the Mail more than anyone alive, pronounces it ‘a damned good read’; and Polly Toynbee, whose loathing is scarcely less vehement, praises it as a ‘well-informed, diamond-shaped analysis’ of the paper that ‘dominates England’s political culture’.