Bøger af Anthony Delano

Think of Cornelius Noon as Hornblower or Jack Aubrey for the age of steam and steel. With his master gunner's eye Noon could drop a bird on the wing or punch a five-inch shell through a distant window. This stirring novel charts his course from the Kentucky hills, where he learned to shoot, to his berth in the United States Navy where his singular talent won him swift promotion. When, in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson ordered the navy to take over a key Mexican port only Noon's deadly marksmanship made it possible. But Noon, always a loner, had his own ideas about what his country should be doing. His educated eye was just as penetrating when came to sizing up the women who were intrigued by his take-it-or-leave it charm: Mrs Smiley the brash bordello keeper and Leonora the cool diplomatic wife who seduced him.

Anthony Delano went to London from Australia after an early newspaper career there and was soon a foreign correspondent for the Daily Mirror, which at that time sold nearly five million copies daily. He was stationed in Rome during the Dolce Vita days, in Paris when General De Gaulle was dismantling the French empire, then the United States where he covered, among many other dramas, the civil rights campaign and the assassination of President John Kennedy. Additional assignments took him all over the globe: wars in Africa and the Middle East, tours with the Queen and other members of the Royal Family; most hazardous of all, perhaps, the historic Beatles tour of America. In between there were executive stints in London. He was managing editor of the Mirror when the monstrous tycoon Robert Maxwell took it over. Clearly time to go. He began to teach journalism and research it academically, gaining first a Master's degree at Queensland University of Technology then a PhD from the University of Westminster (his 2001 doctoral thesis, The Formation of the British Journalist 1900-2000, is widely cited). He became a senior lecturer, senior research fellow and finally visiting professor at the London College of Communication. He lives in the South of France, married to Patricia, a literary scholar.

Before news was shot on microchips and delivered on the internet, getting the pictures home could be as dangerous as filming under fire. Reporter David Talbot and the outrageous cameraman Donnelly come from that frantic time of the Kennedy Assassination, Vietnam and the desperate Arab-Israeli wars. And when they were at home the rackety world of 1970s London and New York. As did sloppy, sexy Adeline Tooth, the star magazine writer who gave as good as she got at the bar in Elaine's, in a desert dugout, or covering the Watergate drama.