Rory Carroll has built a career in places where the story is still moving. Born in Dublin in 1972 and educated at Trinity College and Dublin City University, he started out at The Irish News in Belfast in the mid nineties, where he was named young journalist of the year, before spending two decades reporting for The Guardian from the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Latin America and Los Angeles.
He now covers Ireland for the paper, and his books follow the same instinct: locate the human decision at the centre of a political convulsion, then follow it all the way down. Comandante, his portrait of Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, was named an Economist book of the year. Killing Thatcher, on the Brighton bombing and the manhunt that followed, became a Sunday Times bestseller.
The reporting method carries straight into the history writing. Diaries, court transcripts, police files, declassified papers, then a narrative built to move at pace. Max Hastings called him an exceptionally gifted storyteller, and the description survives contact with the books.
11 hours and 24 minutes
