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.

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.

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

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

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.

I think Bob Woodward's books are important books.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

If you are identified with certain opinions and an ability to express them, and if you can build yourself an audience, a partisan fan base - measured through social media - then you are an official opinionator, monetizable through books, television contracts and the speaking circuit.

If politics is a game of shrewd and knowing men, Trump has ruined it.

With obvious irony, many of the left-leaning privacy advocates who might cheer Apple's stand against the government's intrusion into its system, are now, as transparency advocates, on the side of the leakers of the Panama Papers.

Culture has no logic.

Corbyn and Trump don't seem to have anything in common except the assumption on the part of anyone subscribing at any level to the standard thinking that they could never achieve electoral success. They were supposed to doom, if not destroy, their party's future.