The novel is partly based on Waugh's experience of working for the Daily Mail, when he was sent to cover Benito Mussolini's expected invasion of Abyssinia, later known as the Second Italo-Abyssinian War (October 1935 to May 1936).

Before he died tragically, deranged and attended by nurses, Northcliffe was already exhibiting some of Copper's eccentricities—his megalomania, his habit of giving ridiculous orders to underlings".

[3] It is widely believed that Waugh based his protagonist, William Boot, on Deedes, a junior reporter who arrived in Addis Ababa aged 22, with "a quarter of a ton of baggage".

[5] According to Peter Stothard, a more direct model for Boot may have been William Beach Thomas, "a quietly successful countryside columnist and literary gent who became a calamitous Daily Mail war correspondent".

[8] Mrs Stitch is partly based on Lady Diana Cooper, Mr Baldwin is a combination of Francis Rickett and Antonin Besse.

[10] Christopher Hitchens, introducing the 2000 Penguin Classics edition of Scoop, said "[i]n the pages of Scoop we encounter Waugh at the mid-season point of his perfect pitch; youthful and limber and light as a feather" and noted: "The manners and mores of the press, are the recurrent motif of the book and the chief reason for its enduring magic...this world of callousness and vulgarity and philistinism...Scoop endures because it is a novel of pitiless realism; the mirror of satire held up to catch the Caliban of the press corps, as no other narrative has ever done save Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's The Front Page.

[13] In 1972, Scoop was made into a BBC serial: it was adapted by Barry Took, and starred Harry Worth as William Boot and James Beck as Corker.

[14][15] "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole", a line from one of Boot's countryside columns, has become a famous comic example of overblown prose style.