Old Bakery Books.co.uk

Modest and thought-provoking, this book looks at a past world through the window of the author's experience. An Englishman from an ecentric background, Mark Frankland was recruited as a spy, but eventually became a journalist. He describes such things as Moscow under Kruschev and Vietnam.

Amazon.co.uk Review
When the definitive history of the Cold War comes to be written, Frankland's memoir of his time as Observer correspondent in Moscow will be an invaluable source of atmospheric detail. At an early stage, he decided that the louche underground of Moscow's drop-outs and dead-beats was as interesting a source as he could find--his account of the bright doomed youths who flourished briefly during Kruschev's thaw is touching without softening the often sordid details. He is fair-minded about the fearsomely corrupt Victor Louis, prime fixer of the journalistic circuit, and melancholy about the true believers whose genuine idealism was betrayed and battered by the grimy facts of Soviet life. He spent a crucial period in Vietnam and is, again, saddening in his portrait of idealism let down-- cadres who fought bravely for Communist victory, but whose faces did not fit the new regime. Frankland has a particular sympathy with outsiders and the betrayed--he was briefly recruited by British Intelligence, walked out and was made, from time to time, to regret it; as a gay man in intolerant times and places, he knew he would never be on the side of the powerful, would always feel for underdogs.