“In the spring of 2006 I was working on the Observer when, one quiet afternoon, the editor, Roger Alton, called out to me across the newsroom: ‘Jase, d’you fancy going to the World Cup?’ This was a question to which, if you liked football, the answer could not be ‘no’. Alton was an inspirational editor. He combined charm with just a hint of menace. He was menacing because he was capricious and unpredictable. But it was his very unpredictability that made him such a good editor—this and his high intelligence, which he tried to disguise by speaking in a kind of hectic demotic. The writer Geoff Dyer once described him to me, accurately enough, as being like a ‘cross between an Oxford don and a London cabbie.'” New Republic