Crossing the Line: My Life on the Edge

18.99

Martin Dillon

September 2017

In Crossing the Line, former BBC journalist and best-selling author Martin Dillon recalls his courageous journalistic career spent ‘on the edge’ during the worst years of the modern Troubles. His extraordinary story reveals encounters with a roll-call of major political figures, paramilitaries, and Irish literary greats.

Paperback

Description

In Crossing the Line, former BBC journalist and best-selling author Martin Dillon recalls his courageous journalistic career spent ‘on the edge’ during the worst years of the modern Troubles. Following his childhood on Belfast’s Falls Road and his wandering teenage years, Dillon’s move into the world of journalism was soon to lead him down paths of extreme danger, putting himself in harm’s way to reveal the shocking truths of the emerging conflict in his native city. His extraordinary story reveals encounters with a roll-call of major political figures, paramilitaries, and Irish literary greats.

Dillon’s memoir is as compelling as it is incisive; a riot of revelations on the political and sectarian conflict that rocked Belfast during the 1970s and ’80s. Dillon’s aptitude and ambition gave him unparalleled access to the worlds of politics, sectarian violence, literature and media – Crossing the Line exposes the complex and oftentimes devastating thread that joins them.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Part One

1. Belfast – Early Family Roots
2. Ancestral Eccentricities
3. Gerard Dillon: The Making of an Artist
4. George Campbell’s Non-Heads
5. My Life in a Seminary
6. Father and Sons
7. Coming of Age

Part Two

8. The Troubles, and Journalism, Beckon…
9. Setting the Record Straight
10. A Surreal, Violent Landscape
11. Balaclavas, Breadcrumbs & Romper Rooms
12. The BBC Years
13. Irish Literary Giants & a Stray
14. Challenging BBC’s Ethics
15. Genesis of the Peace Process: Hume v Adams
16. Time to “Talkback” & Natural Born Killers
17. The Joker Club
18. Agent Ascot: Paedophile, Terrorist, and British Spy
19. Murderous Choices: Getting Rid of “The Monkey”
20. Counter Terrorism’s Moral Ambiguity
21. In the BBC’s Cross-Hairs
22. Legacies of Home

Epilogue

About the Author

Martin Dillon worked as a BBC journalist for eighteen years producing award-winning programmes for television and radio, and has won international acclaim for his unique, investigative books on the Ireland conflict. Conor Cruise O’Brien, renowned historian and scholar, described him as ‘our Virgil to that inferno’.