Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism

Can a journalist be a revolutionary? Award-winning journalist Patrick Cockburn explores the life and work of his famous radical journalist father

Leading Middle East correspondent surveys the life and work of his father, the groundbreaking radical journalist, Claud Cockburn, and meditates whether journalist can still change the world. Claud started on Fleet Street in the 1930s - where he reported from Berlin and New York, and even interview Al Capone.

A communist, he was sent to cover the Spanish Civil War for the Daily Worker, also clashing with George Orwell who depicted him as the Stalinist Frank Pitcairn. Returning to London, he set up The Week, a radical newsletter that set the template for radical journalism, from Punch to Private Eye. Here he argued against appeasement and gained the attention of the secret service. He also lambasted the British establishment, in particular the Cliveden Set. He later became a novelist, one of which became the John Houston film, Beat the Devil.

This is the first biography of Cockburn, by his youngest son.

Patrick Cockburn is a Middle East correspondent for the Independent and has worked previously for the Financial Times. He has written three books on Iraq’s recent history, including the National Book Circle Awards-shortlisted The Occupation and Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (with Andrew Cockburn), as well as a memoir, The Broken Boy, and, with his son, a book on schizophrenia, Henry’s Demons, which was shortlisted for a Costa Award. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006, and the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009. More recently he has been awarded Foreign Commentator of the Year at the 2013 Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards, Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year in British Journalism Award 2014, and Foreign Reporter of the Year in Press Awards 2014.