This is a history, a diary, a dossier of a radical's working life and circumstances among some of the most momentous years of the century. Its pages echo with the crash of rubble, of the old regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, of the illusions of the post-Cold War West, of physical landscapes in upheaval. Cockburn's own reflections, both personal and political, are interspersed with letters from Claud Cockburn, Graham Greene, friends and irate readers. There are discussions with Noam Chomsky, dippings into criticism, Colette, transvestism, sexual manners, hate mail.