Lewis Chester

Lewis Chester was born in London’s East End. After national service – as an army PT instructor – he read history at Oxford and later studied politics at Harvard. He was an award-winning investigative journalist at the Sunday Times, where he headed the Insight team and wrote features before being fired by Rupert Murdoch as a Wapping “refusenik”. He has written many non-fiction works, among them AN AMERICAN MELODRAMA, a widely acclaimed study of the 1968 presidential election, COPS AND ROBBERS, short-listed for the Crime Writers Gold Dagger Award, and HOAX, which won the Edgar Allan Poe Crime Fact Book Award. His diverse biographical output includes books about Donald McCullin, Britain’s leading war photographer, and Roger Law, the creator of “Spitting Image” – both old mates at the Sunday Times. His latest book, MAKING WAVES: The Journalism of Murray Sayle, is a collection of the best pieces by the journalist, Murray Sayle.

His other biographical subjects have been Lew Grade, Martin Luther King Jnr., Lord Beaverbrook, Jeremy Thorpe, Aristotle Onassis, Howard Hughes, and the impecunious anti-apartheid campaigner, the Reverend Michael Scott. He enjoys swimming in Hampstead ponds and playing cricket for Lord Gnome’s XI.

‘One of the best reporters in Britain. Lewis Chester is, in the Fleet Street argot, “a master of the long grope”.’ – Henry Porter, Illustrated London News