Britain Joins the EEC
Nixon Resigns
Saigon Falls
Elvis Presley Dies
Star Wars
The Test-Tube Baby
The Election of Pope John Paul II
The Worst of Times
Independence for Zimbabwe
The SAS Storm the Iranian Embassy
The Death of John Lennon
The Brixton Riots
The Shooting of Pope John Paul II
The Headingley Test
The Royal Wedding
The Falklands War
The Miners’ Strike
The Brighton Bomb
Live Aid
The Challenger Disaster
Chernobyl
Wapping
The Lockerbie Bombing
Tiananmen Square
The Fall of the Berlin Wall
Modern Times
Nelson Mandela
The Fall of Margaret Thatcher
Desert Storm
The First Briton in Space
Black Wednesday
History in a Handshake
The Channel Tunnel
OJ Simpson Acquitted
Peace in Bosnia
Tony Blair Leads Labour to Power
Hong Kong Handover
The Death of Diana, Princess of Wales
The Good Friday Agreement
The Millennium
September 11
The Death of the Queen Mother
The Fall of Saddam Hussein
July 7 Attacks
The Financial Crisis
The Inauguration of Barack Obama
Coalition
The Royal Wedding
The Death of Colonel Gaddafi
The London Olympics
Andy Murray Wins Wimbledon
Brexit
Grenfell
Coronavirus
George Floyd
Index
About the Publisher
The urge to know what is happening beyond the horizon is as old as humankind. There were printed newssheets circulating in Venice by the sixteenth century, and newspapers well-established in Britain by the early eighteenth. Yet it was The Times which, almost from its founding in 1785, redefined what newspapers should report and, accordingly, what news was.
Britain was unusual in having a press not controlled by the state, but its journalism hitherto had often been merely gossipy, or polemical, or interested purely in politics, or just parochial. The approach of The Times was more professional, reflecting the growing size of the mercantile class and its need to be informed.
In particular, the paper sought from its earliest years to provide regular news from Europe and, later, became one of the first to employ war correspondents to report from the battlefield. Its willingness to print despatches from closer to home, notably details of the Peterloo massacre, was another sign of its independent thinking.
The early development of The Times acknowledged a changing world in which the repeal of taxes on papers hugely increased their circulation and new technology transformed the speed at which news could be gathered; its report in 1840 on the Treaty of Waitangi, which established British governance over New Zealand, took six months to arrive by sea. (Publications that had sat alongside The Times in its early days, but did not focus on the events of the day, turned into magazines.)
Thereafter, The Times evolved as greater competition in the late-nineteenth century challenged its dominant position. It added other sections – editorial leaders, letters, obituaries – which became similarly renowned and valued by its readers. Yet news remained at its core, and still does, even if these days it is filed and edited ever more remotely.
What newspapers afford journalists, that a lens does not, is the opportunity to combine immediacy with a period of reflection. The camera can convey the drama of the moment – an aircraft flying deliberately into a building – but it cannot judge what it signifies. News in print preserves not only the facts, but also the human dimension to great events.
So, in this cavalcade of almost 250 years of history, Times correspondents witness triumph and disaster, but they also bring home their impact on those affected by them. Here is the unsuspecting Doctor Crippen about to be handcuffed by the policeman who has tracked him down, and there the spectators willing the exhausted Dorando Pietri to reach the finishing line of the marathon in the 1908 Olympics.
Japanese soldiers sweep into Nanking, watched by many who will soon become their victims. The Berlin Wall falls, and the Cold War ends, when a single bureaucrat makes a mistake. Thousands of ordinary people
