The House of Beckham

Tom Bower is the author of twenty-three best-selling books. In the late 1950s he travelled to communist Czechoslovakia, and while a student at the LSE he was known as ‘Tommy the Red’. As a journalist, between 1969 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 he travelled across communist East Germany and spent much of his time during the 1970s reporting for BBC TV with British strikers, especially the miners led by Arthur Scargill. In 1989 he worked for three years in Russia, interviewing high-ranking Soviet intelligence officers who played the spy game against the West. He reported wars from Vietnam, the Middle East and South America, where he encountered hard-left idealists and latterday commissars. Bower’s experience of myriad wars, elections, corrupt politicians and shady businessmen cured him of his Marxism, but not of his curiosity and innate scepticism. Dangerous Hero is the latest of his many bestselling and critically acclaimed books.