The Bootle Boy

A brilliantly evocative memoir from the golden age of newspaper publishing, from a man who helped define our modern media.When Les Hinton first fulfils his schoolboy dream of working on Fleet Street, it is still a place awash in warm beer, black ink, fag ash, and hot metal. Fifty-two years after being sent out to buy a sandwich for his first boss, one Rupert Murdoch, when Les finally leaves Murdoch's employment in 2011, the business of news has been turned upside down, in a tumble of social and technological change.Les Hinton has been present at and noiselessly directed several key scenes in that tale of revolutionary transformation, as employee and later head of Murdoch companies in newspapers, magazines, and television, on three continents over five decades, in Wapping and Wall Street, Australia and California.Born amid the rubble of the blitzed docklands of Bootle, and schooled by an itinerant Army childhood, he came to the centre from the periphery, just as...