John Peel is best known for his four decades of radio broadcasting. His Radio 1 shows pretty much defined popular culture as it emerged and shaped the taste of successive generations of music lovers. His Radio 4 show, Home Truths, became required listening for millions. But all the while, Peel was also committing his laconic brilliance to paper, in articles and reviews for newspapers and magazines, his diaries and his letters. ow for the first time, these writings have been brought together. Selected by his wife, Sheila, and his four children, these writings amount to a second autobiography, telling the John Peel story as it happened. From his earliest journalism - and, as Peel admitted in the original synopsis of his autobiography- 'starting with crap pieces (opportunities for hilarious quotes from same clouds are poems written in the sky)', he also wrote contributions for International Times, Oz, Gandalf's Garden and Disc and Music Echo, then Sounds, the Observer, the Independent, Radio Times and he was even briefly a correspondent for Bike magazine. Woven through these pieces are Peel's diary entries, letters and personal reflections from his family who are the subject of s