Believe Nothing until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism

Description

Radical journalist Claud Cockburn fought successfully against the political and media establishment, writing for publications as varied as The Times and Private Eye. To Graham Greene, he was the greatest journalist of the twentieth century.

Born in China in 1904 and educated alongside Evelyn Waugh, Cockburn launched into a stellar career as a Times correspondent, first in Berlin, then New York, interviewing Al Capone in Chicago, and finally Washington. He resigned in 1932 to start The Week, an anti-Nazi and anti-establishment newsletter with an influence out of all proportion to its circulation. British officials were horrified by the scoops he published. These included stories on the political influence of German appeasers - the Cliveden Set - in the British elite and the previously suppressed news of Edward VIII's abdication.

Cockburn wrote dispatches while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. In Spain, he helped W. H. Auden and clashed with George Orwell. Claud's private life, too, was eventful. He was married three times, once to Jean Ross, the model for Christopher Isherwood's Sally Bowles.

Patrick Cockburn, himself an international journalist, chronicles his father Claud's lifelong dedication to a guerrilla campaign against the powerful on behalf of the powerless. It is a biography for today's age, in which journalism is frequently suppressed, overshadowed, undervalued, and corrupted

PRAISE FOR PATRICK COCKBURN
'The greatest living foreign correspondent in English, a writer of understated integrity and compassion, with the necessary balance of indignation and detachment' -NEW YORK TIMES

'Quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in Iraq today' -SEYMOUR HERSH

'Cockburn is one of the best informed on-the-ground journalists' -SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL

'The best journalist's auto-biography to appear for years. This is a story of endurance and a hugely adventurous mind, elegantly told' -EVENING STANDARD on THE BROKEN BOY