that: "Waugh like most good novelists drew on more than one person for each of his characters. He drew on me for my excessive baggage—and perhaps for my naivety...." He further observed that Waugh was reluctant to acknowledge models, so that with Black Mischief'''s portrait of a young ruler, "Waugh insisted, as he usually did, that his portrait of Seth, Emperor of Azania, was not drawn from any real person such as Haile Selassie". According to Peter Stothard, a more direct model for Boot may have been William Beach Thomas, "a quietly successful countryside columnist and literary gent who became a calamitous Daily Mail war correspondent". The novel is full of all but identical opposites: Lord Copper of The Beast, Lord Zinc of the Daily Brute (the Daily Mail and Daily Express); the CumReds and the White Shirts, parodies of Communists (comrades) and Black Shirts (fascists) etc. Other models for characters (again, according to Deedes): "Jakes is drawn from John Gunther of the Chicago Daily News. In [one] excerpt, Jakes is found writing, 'The Archbishop of Canterbury who, it is well known, is behind Imperial Chemicals...' Authentic Gunther." The most recognisable figure from Fleet Street is Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock, Waugh's portrait of Sir Percival Phillips, working then for The Daily Telegraph. Mrs Stitch is partly based on Lady Diana Cooper, Mr Baldwin is a combination of Francis Rickett and Antonin Besse. Waugh's despised Oxford tutor C. R. M. F. Cruttwell makes his customary cameo appearance, as General Cruttwell. One of the points of the novel is that even if there is little news happening, the world's media descending requires that something happen to please their editors and owners back home and so they will create news. Reception Christopher Hitchens, introducing the 2000 Penguin Classics edition of Scoop, said "[i]n the pages of Scoop we encounter Waugh at the mid-season point of his perfect pitch; youthful and limber and light as a feather" and noted: "The manners and mores of the press, are the recurrent motif of the book and the chief reason for its enduring magic...this world of callousness and vulgarity and philistinism...Scoop endures because it is a novel of pitiless realism; the mirror of satire held up to catch the Caliban of the press corps, as no other narrative has ever done save Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's The Front Page."Scoop was included in The Observer's list of the