Me in Old Compton Street, Soho, in 1984
I was born in Edinburgh in 1959, grew up in Ipswich and studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford (1978-81) and journalism at the London College of Printing (1982-83). After 20 years living in London, in 2002 I moved back to live in Ipswich.
Journalism
I spent the 1980s and 1990s mainly working for various radical publications. I was deputy editor of European Nuclear Disarmament Journal (1984-87), reviews editor (1986-91) and then editor (1991-93) of Tribune, deputy editor of New Statesman & Society (1993-96), news editor of Red Pepper (1997-99) and deputy editor of New Times (1999-2000). I wrote a column for Tribune 1998-2014 and was a first-wave blogger on Gauche 2003-15. I have worked as a subeditor on the Guardian since 1999. As a freelance I have written and subbed for dozens of publications.
Books
I was editor (with Mary Kaldor) of Mad Dogs: The US Raid on Libya (Pluto, 1986), co-author (with Nyta Mann) of Safety First: The Making of New Labour (Granta, 1997) and editor of Orwell in Tribune: ‘As I Please’ and Other Writings (Politico’s/Methuen, 2006). In 2013 Aaaargh! Press published Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British Left by me and Kevin Davey as an e-book; it came out as a paperback in autumn 2014, with a new edition published in 2017. My next book is on British admirers of Chinese communism. It will be published in 2019.
Production
My production experience is extensive. All the journalism jobs I have done have involved production work and I have worked widely as a freelance subeditor, as a book and report copy-editor and as a designer (see production page). I am conversant with all the industry standard software for print and online production and teach students how to use it (see teaching page).
Teaching
I have been teaching journalism for more than 30 years. I started out as a day-a-week visiting lecturer on access courses in the mid-1980s, worked as a visiting lecturer on BA programmes for most of the 1990s and was on staff as a journalism lecturer at City University London 2000-11, working as a course director on undergraduate programmes from 2003. I was a visiting lecturer at Brunel University 2012-14. I am currently teaching on a BA Multimedia Journalism course at the University of Essex which I helped devise.