Colin Smith

John Bierman and Colin Smith are both award-winning journalists. Bierman, a seasoned ex-BBC television correspondent and documentary film-maker, worked as a senior sub-editor in Fleet Street and edited dailies in East Africa and the West Indies before moving into broadcasting. Smith covered many wars for the Observer, of which he was an assistant editor, and also served terms as its Defence, Middle East, Asia and Washington correspondent. His description of the carnage on Mutla Ridge during the Gulf War was collected in three anthologies of that conflict in Britain and America.

Bierman and Smith have separately published a number of previous books, this being their second collaboration. Their first was Fire in the Night, a widely praised biography of the maverick British comander Orde Wingate, who fought behind enemy lines in Ethiopia and Burma during the Second World War.