About Roger Hermiston

I’m a writer of contemporary history books that are underpinned by rigorous scholarship, enhanced by a journalist’s eye and driven by exciting storytelling.

My latest book Two Minutes To Midnight; 1953, The Year of Living Dangerously is the story of one of the most tense years in the early Cold War, with the nuclear arms build-up, the death of Stalin, the malign influence of Joe McCarthy, and the continuing war in Korea.

My first book was Clough and Revie, an acclaimed double biography of two of English football’s most famous and controversial managers. My second (shortlisted for Best Intelligence Book of the Year 2014) was The Greatest Traitor – The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake, the extraordinary story of a British spy whose treachery caused untold damage to the West in the Cold War.

My next book All Behind You, Winston – Churchill’s Great Coalition 1940-45 was about the often-overlooked men (and two women) in Churchill’s government who helped steer Britain to victory on the Home Front, and laid the foundations of the ‘New Jerusalem’.

Before pursuing a full-time writing career, I had been a journalist for thirty years, the bulk of them at the BBC where I was Assistant Editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme from 1998-2010. I started out on weekly papers in Kent and Yorkshire, before becoming Crime Reporter on the daily Sunderland Echo in the late 1980s. I then spent three years as reporter and feature writer on the Yorkshire Post, before joining the BBC in 1990. In eighteen years on Today I covered general elections at home, American presidential elections, war in Kosovo and civil war in Algeria. I was commended (with Evan Davis) in the Texaco Industrial Journalism Awards in 1995, and was a member of the Today team that won a number of Sony Awards for Best Programme.

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