Keith Waterhouse, who wrote an ill-fated screenplay based on this book, said that Slip-Up was Perhaps the best analysis of Fleet Street at work ever written . It is the story of the discovery in Rio de Janeiro of Ronald Biggs, a celebrity fugitive on the run for 12 years after the Great Train Robbery of 1963 and the fiasco that resulted when newsmen and detectives worked out a bizarre plot to bring him back to Britain. Initially a cosy, if highly irregular, conspiracy between Scotland Yard and the Daily Express, the hunt for Biggs soon embroiled every circulation-hungry rival newspaper. And...

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.

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...