Words as Weapons:Selected Writing 1980-1990
Voted 1989 Journalist of the Year for his tireless investigative reporting, Paul Foot is that rarest of creatures--a journalist with a mass audience and a clear socialist commitment.
In this sparkling collection of his writing over the past decade, Foot moves from ferocious salvoes against the Tories and their friends in high (and often low) places, through the Labour Party's feeble opposition and the socialist ideas it seems to have forgotten, to portraits of great dissenters in English radical history: Godwin, Shelley, Mary Shelley, George Orwell and Ian Botham.
Paul Foot speaks in different voices to different audiences but underpinning all his work, whether it is for the Daily Mirror or the London Review of Books, lies a respect for the power of the written word to intervene--to right injustice, to expose corruption and to puncture the smug hypocrisy of a self-righteous, conspiratorial elite.
Reviews
For his ever-tighter grasp of the techniques of exposé, and his production of it on a seemingly industrial scale, the award of Journalist of the Year goes to Paul Foot.
Paul Foot of the Daily Mirror is Britain's most brilliant investigative journalist. He specialises in championing causes others have given up as lost ... [he] is the uncomfortable conscience who will not go away. That is what real campaigning journalism is all about.