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On 17 April 1986 a British television journalist was kidnapped in Beirut. His name was John McCarthy and he was to remain a hostage for the next five years. During those years he was cut off from everything and everybody he knew and loved, from family, friends, and, perhaps above all, from Jill Morrell, the girl he was going to marry. For five years, John McCarthy had to endure the deprivation - both physical and psychological - of captivity; the filth and the squalor of the cells in which he wa...

A smart and hilarious memoir of privilege and excess told by the son of a powerful, seductive member of the New York elite. Ben Sonnenberg grew up in the great house on Gramercy Park in New York City that his father, the inventor of modern public relations and the owner of a fine collection of art, built to celebrate his rise from the poverty of the Jewish Lower East Side to a life of riches and power. His son could have what he wanted, except perhaps what he wanted most: to get away. Lost Pro...

Eric Rouleau was one of the most celebrated journalists of his generation, a status he owed to his extraordinary career, which began when Hubert Beuve-Mery, director of Le Monde, charged him with covering the Near and Middle East. In 1963, Rouleau was invited by Gamal Abd al-Nasser to interview him in Cairo, a move which was not lost on the young Rouleau-going through him, a young Egyptian Jew who had been exiled from Egypt in late 1951, shortly before the Free Officers coup, was a means to ren...

“I am not interested in why man commits evil; I want to know why he does good.” — Vaclav Havel What makes a poor, small-town journalist stay on a story even though threatened with certain death, and offered handsome rewards for looking the other way? Over four years, Terry Gould has travelled to Colombia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Russia and Iraq – the countries in which journalists are most likely to be murdered on the job – to attempt to answer this question. In each place, through conv...

Vincent Starrett, the well-known author and book columnist on the Chicago Tribune, recounts his own rich experiences in what can best be described as the autobiography of a bookman. As such it is the story of a man who has lived by books. Although an novelist and story writer by trade, he writes about the books of others with enthusiasm and authority, and about the great and near-great among authors, booksellers, collectors, and, above all, the classic array of newspapermen with whom he has shar...

With an Introduction and Notes by David Ellis, University of Kent at Canterbury. In the first part of this famous work, published in 1821 but then revised and expanded in 1856, De Quincey vividly describes a number of experiences during his boyhood which he implies laid the foundations for his later life of helpless drug addiction. The second part consists of his remarkable account of the pleasures and pains of opium, ostensibly offered as a muted apology for the course his life had taken bu...

"On her way to work one summer morning, a beautiful young television anchorwoman vanishes without a trace. Precious little evidence remains: only her car and a few puzzling clues. Peer behind the scenes of this true crime story, and uncover the cold case file of Jodi Huisentruit, the Iowa anchorwoman who mysteriously disappeared before dawn on June 27, 1995. Was it a stranger abduction? Was she taken by someone she knew? Someone somewhere still harbors the truth about what happened to Jodi...

On her husband's choice of neckwear: Did you buy that tie?' 'Of course I did - how do you think I got it?' 'I assumed it had been given away free with something.' Katharine Whitehorn pioneered the first of the personal columns. She told us how it really was. She was funny - and smart. For nearly 40 years the Observer's star columnist, she is also famous for Cooking in a Bedsitter. Much loved for her frankness and honesty, her autobiography is about family, studying at Roedean, work on Fleet Stre...

The story of legendary American journalist William L. Shirer and how his first-hand reporting on the rise of the Nazis and on World War II brought the devastation alive for millions of Americans When William L. Shirer started up the Berlin bureau of Edward R. Murrow's CBS News in the 1930s, he quickly became the most trusted reporter in all of Europe. Shirer hit the streets to talk to both the everyman and the disenfranchised, yet he gained the trust of the Nazi elite and through these contacts...

'The bombshell book everyone is talking about' DAILY MAIL 'A radio genius ... the maestro of the show' EVENING STANDARD As presenter of Radio 4's Today, the nation's most popular news programme, John Humphrys was famed for his tough interviewing. He has been at the heart of journalism for decades. Now, he offers his life story from the poverty of his post-war childhood in Cardiff, leaving school at fifteen, to the summits of bro...

This is the witty, candid story of a daring young man who made his own way to the heights of American journalism and public life, of the great adventure that took him at only twenty years old straight from Harvard to almost four years in the shooting war in the South Pacific, and back, from a maverick New Hampshire weekly to an apprenticeship for Newsweek in postwar Paris, then to the Washington Bureau chief's desk, and finally to the apex of his career at The Washington Post. Bradlee took the h...