If you run for president and lose, you promote yourself into all sorts of more lucrative, possibly more influential and surely more fun media opportunities.

The most important virtue in politics was once thought to be likeability. But in Corbyn, dislikeable was king. Actually, dislikeability reached its apotheosis in Donald Trump, who exhibited sourness, truculence and negativity in every step and tweet.

I've said many times: I'm not a Washington reporter.

One of the annoyances of working for The Guardian is that, obsessed as the organisation is with its digital and social media presence and its own sense of singular importance, editors would militantly try to edit your tweets.

Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue.

Politics, which really is about the art of expression, ought to be a logical profession for writers (it's very hard to explain to politics- and policy-addicted people that language is the basis of all ideas - if you can't say it, you can't think it), instead of a refuge for lawyers and apparatchiks.

As the entertainment industry became more corporate and MBA-driven, Harvey Weinstein remained an unreconstructed specimen of the worst and most compelling character traits of a truer Hollywood. Harvey, and in a sense only Harvey, continued to embody the Hollywood self.

The hold on power always ends. While death will surely break it, someone else usually grabs it before then.

Rusbridger's curious success, especially for a temperamentally remote figure, has been to give a reasonable face to the Guardian's quite quixotic mission.

Bieber is the first mega YouTube star, born inexplicably out of a novel and disruptive medium. It has, of course, always been so for pop culture: feverish bubbles, silly novelty acts and disconcerting new forces impose themselves on a reluctant and condescending media.

More than any other president, save perhaps John F Kennedy, whose father ran a film studio, and Ronald Reagan, a leading man and governor of California, Trump is on a buddy basis with media moguls, a speed dialer with the heads of studios and media conglomerates.

At a particularly dicey moment in my own love life when I was interviewing Rupert Murdoch a number of years ago, I tried to get some advice from him about, well, about anything a man with three wives, the latest the age of his children, might offer.

Rusbridger's intelligence, personal sense of higher calling and almost other-worldly self-absorption have played no small part in the stories that have most defined the Guardian and that, under another sort of steward, might have had a much more sceptical reception.

I think Bob Woodward's books are important books.

What's wrong with politics in the celebrity billionaire analysis is politicians. Populism is not so much a cry for economic equality, or even a disdain for elites, but a mass revulsion against the inauthenticity of politicians. Celebrities are real celebrities, politicians are fake ones.

Alan Rusbridger is, to many, among the most admired newspaper editors of our time.

Politics is ultimately not that complicated a profession; it's where the mediocre distinguish themselves.

The Apple imperative is to build a system that is 100 per cent resistant to any government warrant. The data on your iPhone, no matter how swarmy, corrupt, or dangerous you are, is supposedly safe. That's also the proposition of Panamanian banking laws.

The Snowden story, which won the Guardiana Pulitzer Prize, became the realisation of Rusbridger's dream of a brand-building, left-wing-uniting, global and viral story.

Guns in America have an atavistic force. Possessing them, or the act of not possessing them, is an identity that seems to pass from father to son.

In the litany of issues that separate the two Americas - one more conservative and one more liberal, increasingly as opposed and intractable and opaque to each other as the Palestinians and Israelis - none is so fierce, precise, inviolable and confounding to the other side as guns.

This American right to bear arms with, practically, a Muslim fierceness, sometimes seems as if it must be age-old, an ancient tradition from a tenacious frontier holdover.

I have never heard the word brand used so often as I did around The Guardian. Brand was the magical word, particularly as it was uttered by Alan Rusbridger, that would transform the paper and the goal that everyone was working toward.

One of the frustrations of the Republicans is that they have been mostly unsuccessful in equating the word Clinton with Mafia, which, to them, seems so head-smackingly obvious.

Next to financial impropriety, being charged with a reckless pursuit of women is certainly the most damaging thing you can accuse a public person of.

Trump loves the media. Trump understands the power it has and, accordingly, loves the people who have media power.

Long-running scandal fuels targeted political media. It's the stuff of obsession, which is the basis of a passionate core audience. More obsession means more passion and a crazy, over-the-top audience. Equally, of course, this obsession leads to less soberness, moderation and disinterest in the media world.

Brexit and Trump had upended the fundamental establishment viewpoint that politics was aspirational, that good politics promised progress, generational betterment and ever-expanding world reach.

Trump is a man who, for better or worse, stands in opposition to the institutions that dominate American political life.

In business terms, if you take over a company and oust its CEO or fire a divisional chief, you run the place. But in institutional terms, as it happens, it doesn't at all work that way.

During my many hours on the Acela, I have taken to watching 'The West Wing,' Aaron Sorkin's drama of an idealised White House.

The most significant social pathology of my youth was the generation gap.

Brexit and Trump are a generational revenge. This may partly be against millennial certainty and superiority, and, indeed, ageism; and it may be a natural part of population dynamics - not only are more people getting far older than ever before, but they are older for longer than they are young.

As much as any other producer in the modern movie age, Harvey Weinstein has been a subject of media fascination. The grossness, the bullying, the unbridled exercising of personal power, the craven appetites, the awards and his good taste in films fed that fascination.

Donald Trump is a family man.

Two opposite and instructive figures in U.S. journalism during the Trump years are Gerard Baker, editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Martin Baron, editor of the Washington Post.

In one sense, newspaper editor is an appropriate job for an out-of-work politician; politicians live the news cycle as intensely as editors.

Donald Trump has been both a peculiar and characteristic American figure for more than three decades. Inheriting a small New York real-estate development company from his father, he parlayed it not so much into a big real-estate company, but himself into a fantasy of a big real-estate developer.

When 'Fire and Fury' came out, I thought Steve Bannon would certainly never speak to me again, and the truth is, he never stopped speaking.

If the president of the United States comes after you, you feel concerned.

As a journalist - or as a writer - my obligation is to come as close to the truth as I possibly can. And that's not as close to someone else's truth, but the truth as I see it.

I'm not a daily reporter. I'm not a newspaper reporter, I'm not a political reporter.

It's not implausible that Donald Trump could have been a successful President.

A President of the United States cannot restrain anything from publication.

Running for office, or suggesting you might, is no longer about being a politician but being an independent opinion or sensibility entrepreneur. You're looking for an audience to identify with you. Rather than trying to convince a majority of the electorate, you're looking to cull your particular following.

One of the great business virtues of high publishing was that it was a difficult business to enter. You had to stand for something.

If institutions don't grow, they... well, I don't know what happens to them, because they always grow. I suppose the point is that we forget about the ones that don't.

Bill de Blasio, for his part, became the mayor of New York, surely the most powerful local political position in the nation, and arguably - after Giuliani and Bloomberg - one with a national base, one with, practically speaking, no job at all. He went from marginal political flotsam and jetsam to extraordinary centrality within a few months time.

Being the governor of New York is a mighty job because of the city of New York. You would not want to be the governor of just upstate.

Everybody appears to look down on Bieber. No person able to write a grammatical sentence about Justin Bieber actually thinks him worthy of the sentence.