Books & Spoken Word
Les Hinton: An Untidy Life in News
- Artists
- Les Hinton
Les Hinton introduces his memoir, The Bootle Boy – an Untidy Life in News.
When Les Hinton first fulfilled his schoolboy dream of working on Fleet Street, it was still a place awash in warm beer, black ink, fag ash and hot metal. Fifty-two years after being sent out to buy a sandwich for his first boss, one Rupert Murdoch, the business of news had been turned upside down, in a tumble of social and technological change.
Hinton has been present at and noiselessly directed several key scenes in that tale of revolutionary transformation, as employee and later head of Murdoch companies in newspapers, magazines and television, on three continents over five decades. He describes the upheavals that swept his trade, and shows us how politicians alternately canoodled and raged inside their arranged media marriages. He discusses the death of Diana, the IRA bombings and the phone-hacking scandal from a revelatory new angle, and gives the most undiluted portrait yet of the man who is perhaps the last of the great press barons.
is needed now More than ever
Image credit: Arthur Edwards
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