A broad-faced man whose cheeks bunch above a firm, square jaw when he weighs a person up. His swept-back dark gray hair has a slightly damp sheen, as if he has just smoothed it into obedience; neat gray side-whiskers frame a mouth that rarely opens wide. His teeth are unusually even and carefully maintained, but a small gold filling flashes when he laughs, which he does more readily at bad news than at jokes. He stands poised and appraising, moving with the economical turns of someone accustomed to making a crowded office part around him. The impression is of a man who has already decided what your story will sound like in print.

Banghurst is generous with information when it costs him little and unexpectedly protective when a junior worker is being bullied. He prizes blunt truth, yet edits his own motives into respectable shape. In a newsroom crisis he becomes quick, decisive, and almost cheerful; when family or old guilt enters the conversation, he grows rigid and distracts himself with practical questions. He enjoys a sharp argument but dislikes being laughed at.

Banghurst began as a copy boy, carrying damp proofs through the steam and ink of a provincial daily. He learned that a correction printed prominently could matter more than a speech delivered to a hall. At thirty-one he bought a failing paper with borrowed money and turned it into a city institution by printing both the council's denials and the evidence that made them necessary. Years later, during the Wapping Quay pressure-vessel disaster, he received a warning that the works' experimental engine was unstable. He delayed publication while trying to confirm it. The engine burst before dawn, killing eleven workers, including his younger brother, whose name Banghurst had once removed from a strike report at their mother's request. He has since become faster to publish and slower to forgive himself. His paper, the Evening Bell, is currently squeezed by a bank's demands, a circulation war, and a new government office that wants him to print reassuring accounts of uncanny mechanical incidents. His production manager, Kálmán Tóth, is the one colleague who can tell him to stop; his estranged daughter, Hester, writes anonymous labor dispatches for a rival paper and has not told him she is the author.