Book description
Martin Bell OBE has been many things - an icon of BBC war reporting,
Britain's first independent MP for 50 years, a UNICEF ambassador, and
'the man in the white suit' - a tireless campaigner for honesty and
accountability in politics. But as For Whom the Bell Tolls reveals, he's
also a poet of light verse, and here Bell's poems continue his war by
other means on duplicitous politicians, our all-consuming media, the
venality of celebrity culture and much more. The earliest poem here was
written when Martin was 19; the most recent cover the riots of August
2011, the phone-hacking scandal and the 'Arab spring'.Oscillating
between trenchant satire and touching honesty with often poignant
autobiography spiced with gentle humour, Bell presents poems on Tony
Blair and Iraq, on Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic, on his hero,
Reuters reporter Kurt Schork, and colourful episodes from his work and
life, from the chart-topping calypso written about him in St Lucia to
his being a guest at Idi Amin's wedding:'…that by God / Was well worth
doing, if distinctly odd.' Martin Bell OBE is one of the
best-known and most highly regarded names in British television
journalism. As a BBC reporter he has covered foreign assignments in
more than 80 countries and eleven wars including Vietnam, Nigeria,
Angola, Nicaragua, The Gulf and Bosnia, where millions watched as he
was nearly killed by shrapnel. In 1997 Martin became the first
Independent MP to be elected to Parliament since 1950. His previous
books are In Harm's Way (Penguin, 1995), An Accidental MP (Viking,
2000) and Through Gates of Fire (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003)
