ADAM MACQUEEN
Adam Macqueen is a journalist and author who has contributed to Private Eye magazine since 1997 and wrote the history of the magazine to celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2011. Between 1999-2002 he was deputy editor of The Big Issue. As an author his books have the most intriguing titles – The Prime Minister’s Ironing Board, The Lies of the Land: A Brief History of Political Dishonesty and The King of Sunlight. His first novel, Beneath the Streets, is a political thriller and published by Lightening Books in March 2020.
BLACK HEARTS IN BATTERSEA
by Joan Aiken, 1964
‘I’ve picked this because it’s a rollicking read, full of intrigue, adventure and excitement, and it introduces perhaps the greatest role-model in children’s literature, Dido Twite. But it has a particular significance for me now because it’s the first book that made me realise – decades ahead of Gordon Burn’s and Robert Harris’s – that you don’t have to stick to the rules: you can take the bits of history you want and reshape the rest into your own story, as I’ve done with . Aiken’s whole series takes place in an alternative England where James III is on the throne and dastardly Hanoverians are plotting against him, and where wolves roam the countryside, having entered the country through a channel tunnel completed a couple of hundred years ahead of schedule.
