Gilded Vagabond
By Keith Hindell
July 2012
Book Guild
ISBN: 9781846246920
Distributed by Trans-Atlantic Publications
321 pages, Illustrated
$37.50 Hardcover
On a grey day in 1947 everything changes for Keith Hindell. Through a new scholarship scheme, the young working-class boy finds himself in the hallowed halls of Harrow public school and his horizons expanded beyond the limits of his boyhood imagination.
Oxford follows, after two years of National Service in Hong Kong and a series of exhilarating adventures in the Alps. Then academia beckons and after further study in Illinois, USA, Hindell settles down to economic research in a think tank. But destiny has other plans and before long Keith changes course to the competitive and frenetic world of news media. Over the next 25 years he carves out a career as a producer, editor and broadcaster for the BBC and beyond, working on flagship BBC radio programmes (including Today, Ten O'clock and The World Tonight) and then becoming the network's UN correspondent in New York. Here Keith covers some of the seminal moments of the era, from South African apartheid to the Falklands War. Interviewing presidents, prime ministers, policymakers and ambassadors, and travelling the globe in the process, he paints a vivid picture of the daily cut and thrust of life behind the doors of the 'Peace Palace'.