REVIEW: From a Suva gossip column to Fleet Street

Reviewed book by Phillip Cass

Abstract

Review of A Hack's Progress, by Phillip Knightley. London: Vintage.

Knightley's book is self critical, especially about the value of his writing on the intelligence service during the Cold War and he refers to himself as "the world's worst war correspondent" for assuring his editor at the Sunday Times that there would be no war in the Middle East — on the eve of the Six Day War. For a journalist who has achieved so much prominence for his work as an investigative journalist for the quality British press and his subsequent books, Knightley appears to have been singularly uncertain about what he wanted to do for a living.