ABSTRACT
The year 1956 is renowned for a cluster of portentous episodes, with more or less of a bearing on the newspaper industry. It was the year of Suez and also of Look Back in Anger, though with the play preceding the political crisis rather than subsuming it in the retrospect. The United States had offended not only by its post-war elevation to the status of twin super-power with the Soviet Union, to the exclusion of Britain, and suborning British youth with its popular culture, but recently also by castigating the Suez adventure. A sign of barefaced times was the dwindling circulation of the News of the World, Rupert Murdoch's first acquisition on the British market in 1968, with Robert Maxwell being pipped for ownership in the earliest of a series of such skirmishes between the two which Maxwell was 'sure to lose', Antony to Murdoch's Octavius.
