Politics are his job as well as his hobby. He works on a trade magazine, writing about how the environment affects health. Many moons ago, after graduating from a UK university, he attended the University of Paris VIII to study American literature: the novels of Thomas Wolfe. He then hitchhiked through the United States and lived for year, in 1983, in New Mexico. He loves American literature – Chandler and Hammett, naturally, and also, in the crime and pulp genre, Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich, Elmore Leonard, Georges Simenon (and many more). He lives in Forest Hill, south-east London, sharing his house with a cat and small collection of guitars. He has a grown-up daughter and two wonderful grandkids. His published books included espionage-based thrillers and social history. One day, he hopes to live in a log cabin, next to a lake.