A lively history of the paper from 1986 to 1995 covers global upheaval, internal conflict and a bold but brilliant redesign

In my early career as a cultural historian, I made many journeys along the Northern line in London to the now defunct British Newspaper Library at Colindale. It was a melancholy place, with that vanilla-and-almonds smell of decomposing ink and paper, and little crumbs of disintegrated newspaper on the floor by the reading desks. Like the mayfly, a newspaper is meant to die on the day it is born. News now lives longer on the Guardian website, but prominently displayed warnings tell us when an article is more than a month old. “Who wants yesterday’s papers?” the Rolling Stones sang. “Nobody in the world.”

So newspaper history is a tricky genre that must capture the ephemeral and show why it matters. Ian Mayes’s excellent book follows two previous, quasi-official volumes of Guardian history by David Ayerst and Geoffrey Taylor. It begins in 1986 when the Guardian was still a one-section, inky, monochrome paper full of misprints and poor quality pictures, newly threatened by Rupert Murdoch’s move to Wapping and the birth of the Independent. It ends in 1995 with a radically restyled paper, with new sections such as G2 and the pocket-sized TV and entertainment supplement, the Guide. A second volume will tell the story up to 2008, when the Guardian moved to its current home in Kings Place.