For any aspiring journalist in the 1970s, there were two writers to whom one looked above all others, as examples not only of acuity and stylistic excellence but of the possibilities that journalism seemed to offer to experience and write the world anew.

One was Gay Talese, the father of New Journalism, a literary movement that grew up in the 1960s, which eschewed the customary Olympian detachment of newspaper and magazine reporting in favour of an immersive style of writing that turned all of the devices of fiction – reported speech, scene-setting, intimate details and the use of interior monologue – to the service of factual reporting.

The Telegraph London