Here's a certainty: When you play out your personal dramas, hurt and self-interest in the media, it's a confection. You say what you have to say in the way you have to say it to give it media currency - and that's always far from the truth. Often, in fact, someone else says it for you. It's all planned. It's all rehearsed.

President Donald J Trump and the U.S. media appear now to be split by deep doctrinal differences - of the constitutional crisis kind. But, virtually up until the split, Trump and the media were as one - a perfect symbiosis.

The more power you have, the more surely it will be taken from you before you are ready to give it up.

One of the anomalies of digital journalism is a lack of clarity between high and low. That's the historic distinction in publishing, mass from class, the vulgar from the refined, tabloid from broadsheet, the penny press from papers costing a nickel.

Voters seem to enjoy voting for what experts believe they won't vote for.

The Clintons are one of the most closed political organisations operating in America today. It is a kind of secret society.

Before even getting to David Cameron's father here's a starting-point question about the Panama Papers: how is the desire to break the anonymity of Panama banking secrecy different from the FBI's interest in breaking Apple's encryption of the iPhone?

A particular modern problem is that megalomania, especially when it involves real estate development, is the disturbance of many faceless men. And a faceless man is a difficult enemy.

If selling had been part of his job description, Rusbridger, who never met a pound he had to earn that didn't disgust him in some visceral way, would have been disqualified long ago. Indeed, his early enthusiasm for the Internet - and a continuing principle of faith for him - was that it was free.

Politics is a literal game. Every word must represent a strict view - or be so abstract as to be meaningless.

I work like every journalist works so I have recordings, I have notes.

Indeed, Rusbridger has finessed for the Guardian a certain willing suspension of disbelief and is able to credibly maintain conceits and moral standards to which his own behaviour hardly conforms.

Donald Trump doesn't necessarily stay mad for very long. He's a transactional guy. If you can offer him something, he will take it. Or from a salesman's point of view, if he's not making the sale, you're of no use to him. But if you suddenly come back into the showroom and are willing to buy, he's willing to sell.

Along with Trump, there are few people, on either the right or the left, who would defend the system. The system is, everyone believes, broken: it's an insider's game; it's totally fixed; it serves itself. Trump codified this into a simple and vivid idea: the swamp.

All politicians, no matter how gifted, ultimately depend on circumstances for their success.

Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W Bush (and, in their image, Tony Blair) bitterly annoyed their antagonists because they were - at least until the Iraq war caught up with Blair and Bush - Teflon. David Cameron is in this model.

Every journalism bromide - speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the powerful - that otherwise would be hopelessly sappy to a journalist of any experience, has become a Twitter grail. The true business of journalism has become obscured because there is really no longer a journalism business.

The rise of Donald Trump established a new ground zero for liberal media, requiring no pretence of balance - better yet, with a kind of political brain haemorrhage, everybody seemed to have lost the ability to be balanced.

Fame, in Trumpian fashion, is war. You are expected to defend your fame; many people want to take it from you.

The emerging notion of the Eighties was that publicity was a currency. The old view was that if you had a currency - your talent or your product - publicity might draw attention to it. The new view was that publicity in itself, highlighting you, bestowed value.

I mean, can Donald Trump get elected again in 2020 without Steve Bannon? I would say no.

How advertising is handled has always been a key distinction between low and high order publishing. The higher you stood, the more separate you were from advertising, and, in the logic of snobbery, the greater a premium price the top brands would pay to be in your company.

The most characteristic aspects of the Clintons, a political couple who might otherwise largely see themselves as practical-minded centrist consensus builders, is, of course, how much personal hatred they inspire.

The Steve Bannon I know - I locate Steve's politics as a Democrat circa 1962.