Jim Holt

Now in his late 80s, Sir Harold Evans is one of the greatest and most garlanded editors alive. He emerged from a working-class Welsh family in the north of England to make his reputation as an ambitious young newspaperman. From 1967 to 1981 he was helmsman of the Sunday Times, which he turned into a powerhouse of investigative journalism. Leaving the Times after he clashed with its new purchaser, Rupert Murdoch, Evans soon moved to the United States. By the 1990s he had become head of Random House, where he edited the books of eminences like Norman Mailer and Henry Kissinger. Subsequently he himself wrote several popular books on American history. He is married to Tina Brown, the erstwhile editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Harry and Tina are Manhattan’s ultimate editorial power couple. One imagines that, after the last guest has left one of their glittering Sutton Place soirees, their pillow talk abounds in terms like “stet,” “transpose” and “delete.”

As a master editor and distinguished author, Evans is well qualified to instruct us on how to write well. But can he delight us in the process? After reading this book, I can affirm that the answer is yes. For the most part. Up to a point.

“What really matters is making your meaning clear beyond a doubt,” Evans tells us. And the key to clarity, he insists, is concision – a virtue allegedly less honoured in the United States than in the UK: “Newsprint rationing in wartime Britain enforced economy in language, a conciseness not required in American print journalism, where acres of space invited gentle grazing.”

The precepts Evans offers are both edifying and entertaining. In his “Ten Shortcuts to Making Yourself Clear,” for instance, No. 7 is “Don’t Be a Bore.” This may sound like an empty injunction, but Evans elaborates it into a discussion of different sentence structures available to a writer – “loose,” “periodic,” “balanced” – explaining how their varied deployment can avert monotony and even, in the hands of expert prose writers, achieve a sort of music.

Also enjoyable are Evans’s history of the “readability” movement, launched by 19th-century American reformers who wanted written

Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters

By Harold Evans Little, Brown, 416pp, £20