By the journalist who won the International Reporter of the Year award and the United Nations Association Media Peace Prize, this book brings together the episodes for which his journalism is renowned, analyzing the nature of both these great upheavals and the domestic tragedies he has encountered. The result is as much a personal story as it is a tribute to the ordinary people he has come across living in difficult and brutal conditions. These are the heroes of the book. They include the Irish labouring generation of his great-great grandfather, who was transported in irons to Australia for uttering unlawful oaths; the modern poor of Britain whose hopes of a better life have been fostered for political expediency, and then betrayed; the victims of conflict in Vietnam, Cambodia, Africa, the Middle East and Central America; the people denied civil liberties in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. He identifies some of the silences of imperial history, for example the largely untold story of the Aborigines.