Dangerous Hero

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.

’The book every voter must read’ Mail on Sunday ‘Funny and devastating, it stands as an indictment of both the Labour Party and a political system that allows an individual such as Jeremy Corbyn to come within shouting distance of the levers of power in this country.’ Daily Telegraph‘The most compelling in-depth study so far of a man whose head is unusually difficult to get inside.’ The Guardian‘An unexpectedly funny account of the Labour leader’s life … the author reveals a side of Corby’s personality that is not at all well known or even acknowledged in today’s Labour Party: his love of the limelight. The book describes, in hilarious detail, Corbyn’s determination to be part of the story of the election of Britain’s first three black MPs … Entertaining and impressive research … Bower’s meticulous and highly readable account must be absorbed from start to finish. Funny and devastating, it stands as an indictment of both the Labour Party and a political system that allows an individual such as Jeremy Corbyn to come within shouting distance of the levers of power.’ Daily Telegraph‘One of the most depressing books I’ve ever read. It is a forensically detailed portrait of a man with no inner life, a monomaniac suffused with an overwhelming sense of his own righteousness … Probably the most shocking fact in this biography is that so many of his former intimates believe he has never read a book … Nobody who reads this book can be in any doubt that if he became prime minister, he would comfortably be the most indolent, least articulate and least intelligent holder of the office in history’ Dominic Sandbrook, The Times