I grew up reading the Guardian in 1970s Britain, even if I had to use candles during Ted Heath’s three-day week. The paper is for ever associated in my mind with developing a social consciousness and awareness of the world. I learned to think about politics from the columns of James Cameron and would discuss them every time with my mother in the evening.
As a student in the United States my first stop at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library was always the periodical reading room, where they invariably had the Guardian. The Guardian Weekly I discovered for the first time in Australia when I began teaching at the University of Melbourne in 1992. I’ve had a subscription ever since. Nowadays I turn to the always evocative Country Diary first. But what I like best is the history and connection to the Peterloo riot, which inspired my first academic book and a great deal of my subsequent research.
We learn daily how our freedom rests on institutions that are far more precarious than we thought, and the governance structure of the newspaper provides an inspiring model of how to keep the media both fearless and objective.
