Strange People I Have Known ... And Other Stories

During a long career in journalism, Andy McSmith encountered Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in a Siberian town called Bratsk; dined with Sir Edward Heath in his home in Salisbury; was mugged in the street while visiting Moscow with John Major; and knew Boris Johnson as a colleague with an ambition to be something more than just a journalist.

Unusually, though, early in his career he abandoned journalism, to return after more than a decade as a left-wing political activist and playwright. This brought him into close contact with people he would never otherwise have met, including a Trotskyist with a weird millennial vision of the coming revolution, and the strike organiser who brought down leaders of the Polish Communist Party years before the Iron Curtain fell.

Working full time for the Labour Party, he knew Gordon Brown and Tony Blair as new MPs, sharing a cramped office in Parliament.

Before all that, he was a rebellious teenager who was hanging out with the hippies in San Francisco on the day the Beatles icon George Harrison paid a visit.

A host of characters pass through this account of his long life - some highly successful, others not, each recalled in vivid detail.