The Hack's Tale

Offers an exploration of how the media pervades modern existence. The author sets out on a pilgrimage that takes him to Canterbury with Chaucer, the inventor of sitcom, to France with Froissart, the father of modern journalism, and to Italy with Boccaccio, who shaped Italian prose into a medium of racy narrative as crisp and visual as movies.

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Years ago, David Hughes began resisting the way he was dogged by the media. He no longer wanted them swamping his mind, telling him how or what to think, forcing him to spend so much time on the vicarious that he was losing his grip on direct experience. To recapture the immediacy of his life and to track down the culprits who started the rot, David Hughes sets out on a pilgrimage that takes him to Canterbury with Chaucer, the inventor of sitcom, to France with Froissart, the father of modern journalism, and to Italy with Boccaccio, who shaped Italian prose into a medium of racy narrative as crisp and visual as movies. Between the three of them, they delivered western Europe from a hidebound past of chivalry and servitude by booting it with humour into the beginnings of the modern age, but did they also make us hostages to the media?