Quotes of the Week: Loadsa Leveson Inquiry plus a Dickens of a quote from the 19th century

Simon Carr in the Independent on Robert Jay QC, lead counsel at the Leveson Inquiry: "There is something in Mr Jay's manner that would start a fight in a pub. Not just the beard, or the passive combativeness. No, he insinuates mean motives into his questions, and sometimes when he finishes his question he leaves his mouth open. It hangs there, disbelievingly. Try that in the Garrick Club and you'd leave without your teeth."

Paul Dacre at the Leveson Inquiry on what it is giving the public: "A very bleak and one-sided view of the press."

NUJ general secretary Michelle Stanistret at Leveson on Paul Dacre's idea for a press card controlled by the industry: "Akin to licensing journalists which the NUJ would oppose and would damage press freedom within the UK."

The Times editor James Harding at Leveson: “As editor of the paper, I am responsible for what it does and what its journalists do. So I want to say at the outset that I sorely regret the intrusion into Richard Horton’s e-mail account by a journalist then in our newsroom. I am sure that Mr Horton and many other people expect better of The Times. So do I. So on behalf of the paper, I apologise.”

Baroness Buscombe, ex chair of the Press Complaints Commission, at Leveson: "I remember towards the end of my time there, one of the editors asked me 'Peta, don't you trust us?'. And I said with an incredibly heavy heart 'How can I?'. We felt we hadn't been told the truth."

Hugh McIlvanney in the Sunday Times on the death of boxing trainer Angelo Dundee: "Decency is not nearly as rare in professional boxing as some old movies and the trash-talking endemic among modern fighters might suggest. But it seldom shines through the murk with the heart-warming consistency that, for me, made 50 years of sporadic close encounters with Angelo Dundee one of the happiest themes of the sportswriting experience."

Charlie Brooker in the Guardian on the success of MailOnline: "Curiously, the online version of the Mail has become a hit by doing the reverse of what Dacre is commended for doing. It succeeds by remorselessly delivering industrial quantities of precisely the opposite of what a traditional Mail reader would presumably want to read: frothy stories about carefree young women enjoying themselves."

Ex-BBC Today programme editor Kevin Marsh on the tabloid press:"An incredibly powerful, unaccountable machine for turning vindictiveness into cash."

Quote from the 19th Century (via David Hepworth's blog):

Charles Dickens on seeing his name in print for the first time for an unsolicited article 'A Dinner At Poplar Walk' in 1833: "...my first copy of the Magazine in which my first effusion - dropped stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street - appeared in all the glory of print; on which memorable occasion - how well I recollect it! - I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half-an-hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to been seen there."