The journalist’s journalist: the irrepressible Claud Cockburn

No one should be put off reading Patrick Cockburn’s remarkable biography of his father by its misleading subtitle. ‘Guerrilla journalism’ doesn’t do justice to its subject. The suggestion of irregular warfare from the left underrates Claud Cockburn’s great accomplishments in mainstream politics and journalism and doesn’t begin to embrace the romantic and daring complexity of his life and career.

Indeed, it is the journalist son’s signal achievement to have surmounted left-wing cliché and written a fascinating and subtle portrait of a paradoxical career. Claud was a mostly loyal child of the British Empire, who renounced establishment status and comfort (as a distinguished foreign correspondent for the Times) for the freedom (as a committed communist on the margins of British journalism) to pursue and describe the most important story of the 20th century: Adolf Hitler’s mostly unchecked rise to power in Germany and the fascist movement that set fire to the entire world.