The Bootle Boy

The Bootle Boy is a brilliantly evocative memoir from the golden age of newspaper publishing, written by 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, Les finally leaves Murdoch's employment in 2011. By then, 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. He worked as an employee and later head of Murdoch companies in newspapers, magazines, and television across three continents over five decades, from Wapping to Wall Street, and from Australia to California.

Born amid the rubble of the blitzed docklands of Bootle, and schooled by an itinerant Army childhood, Hinton came to the centre from the periphery, just as Murdoch did. There, with a gang of like-minded outsiders, he set about redrawing the map of the media.

Hinton depicts the upheavals that swept his trade with the same widescreen perspective and sharp colours he uses to show us how politicians from Clinton to Blair, Brown to Cameron, alternately canoodled and raged inside their arranged media marriages. We see the death of Diana, the IRA bombings, the charisma of Bill Clinton, and the phone-hacking scandal from a revelatory new angle. Additionally, we get the most undeluded and undiluted portrait yet of the man who is perhaps the last of the great press barons.

Above all, emerging from Hinton's scintillating stories of half a century of Murdoch and news revolutions, comes the voice of a wandering Liverpudlian who is still in love with the life of a newspaperman. He is now the author of one of the defining media memoirs of our age.

Les Hinton's story is about the glory and the tragedy of the newspaper business. He knows all the secrets of this tale and few are more clear-eyed than him when they tell it. - Michael Wolff, author of Fire and Fury

An epic story ... and a penetrating insight into the mind of Murdoch. - Daily Mail

It vividly captures the rise and fall of the press over 60 years ... not an acolyte's paean. - Ian Burrell, I