A journalist from the Guardian sets off on a drinking tour to Berlin in November 1989 and happens to witness the fall of the Wall.

To get an idea of where the daily newspaper "The Guardian" historically fits in the British press landscape, a letter to the editor from July 6, 1987, is helpful. In it, a reader of the "Guardian" recounts recently asking a smoker in a non-smoking lounge at London's Heathrow Airport not to smoke. The smoker replied: "What are you, a reader of the Guardian, or what?"

Founded in 1821, the newspaper is considered a left-liberal paper for "muesli-eating," "Volvo-driving," and "sandal-wearing" philistines with Labour Party membership cards. This is what Ian Mayes, himself a long-time editor of the newspaper, writes in the first volume of its history. Politically, the Guardian stood in opposition to Margaret Thatcher's neoliberal reign and, journalistically, in the shadow of its conservative rival, The Daily Telegraph. The Guardian has now far surpassed the latter and, with over 300 million monthly visitors to its website and 1 million paying supporters, is one of the ten most widely read online media outlets in the world.

The Guardian focused on the global South earlier than other newspapers. As early as 1978, it published a monthly column titled "The Third World Review," in close collaboration with local journalists. A model that has since become established among quality media worldwide for reporting on hard-to-reach regions. Only the cross-financing of the "Third World Review" by a major Luxembourg bank founded by a Pakistani ultimately proved less exemplary.

Part of the thoroughness of Ian Mayes' book is that he also depicts the internal conflicts within the Guardian's editorial staff. The fact that, for example, the letters-to-the-editor page in the 1980s gave the impression that the Guardian was read exclusively by Maoist teachers, which had less to do with the actual readership than with the selection of the responsible letters-to-the-editor, is quite entertaining.

Likewise, there are insights into the street fights between the British printers' unions and Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire in 1986 or the "price war" he instigated in the early 1990s.

Mayes' book is most gripping when he tells of his colleagues, especially his female colleagues, who reported firsthand on the global political upheavals of the time. For example, he tells of the editor of the weekend supplement going on a "drinking tour" to Berlin in November 1989 and coincidentally witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall. Or of the Guardian being one of the few media outlets worldwide with a journalist reporting directly from Baghdad during the first Gulf War.

It is this immediacy and journalistic emphasis, typical of the Guardian, that also aroused the British public's awareness of the horrors and massacres of the Bosnian war in the early 1990s.

In terms of editorial content, the newspaper succeeded in opening itself up to a new, younger readership with the purchase of the Sunday paper "The Observer" and a redesigned Saturday supplement in a tabloid format, usually reserved for tabloids. When long-time editor-in-chief Peter Preston stepped down in 1995, it found a successor in the digitally savvy 41-year-old Alan Rusbridger, who would soon lead the Guardian into an unexpectedly successful future.

Ian Mayes: Witness in a Time of Turmoil. Inside the Guardian's Global Revolution. Volume One: 1986-1995. Guardian Books, 2025. 344 pp., Fr. 46.90.