The authors are grateful to several excellent freelance journalists who did some specific pieces of research, without which the book would be much poorer. They are Jeff Apter, Paris stringer for magazines throughout the English-speaking world; Lynne Wallis, freelance for national papers; and three talented young journalists, Natalie Illsley, Chris Pitchers, and Naomi Westland.
We were also given access to the excellent research done by Sasha Joelle Achilli for the Dispatches programme about Blair, and we thank her for it.
A number of journalists have passed us ideas or tips, or helped us with their knowledge and contacts, and we thank them all. We are immensely grateful to Sam Greenhill of the Daily Mail and his colleagues Simon Walters, Guy Adams and Alex Brummer. We would also like to thank the researcher Richard Cookson. For information on the Middle East, we thank especially Harriet Sherwood (Guardian), Don Macintyre (Independent) and freelance journalists Jonathan Cook, Kieran Kaufman, Lawrence Joffe and Lidia Kurasinska. We would finally like to thank Chris Mitchell at John Blake Publishing for the care and thought which has gone into editing this book.