Adam Macqueen
Adam Macqueen, a journalist and protege of Ian Hislop, has worked for Private Eye, The Big Issue and many other major UK publications. He is also a regular broadcaster on TV and Radio.
'The King of Sunlight' (Bantam) was Adam’s first book, a hugely entertaining biography of the eccentric, late Victorian millionaire-businessman-philanthropist Lord Leverhulme, founder of Lever Bros. Some of his ideas were decades ahead of their time - universal suffrage, workers’ profit shares - others bordered on insanity. Leverhulme’s life is a genuinely startling story.
Adam has since gone on to write and edit PRIVATE EYE: THE FIRST 50 YEARS and has been commissioned by Little, Brown to write a very entertaining exploration of the extraordinary facts, figures and anecdotes which reachb the public domain after the release of government document after the thirty-year restriction expires. 'The Prime Minister's Ironing Board and Other State Secrets (Little, Brown) was published in 2014. In 2017 Atlantic published his book about political dishonesty through the decades 'The Lies of the Land'.
In 2020 Adam's first novel 'Beneath the Streets' will be published by Eye Books. February 1976: the naked corpse of a shockingly underage rent boy is fished out of a pond on Hampstead Heath. Since the police don't seem to care, twenty-year-old Tommy Wildeblood - himself a former `Dilly boy' prostitute - finds himself investigating. Dodging murderous Soho hoodlums and the agents of a more sinister power, Tommy uncovers another, even more shocking crime: the Liberal leader and likely next Home Secretary, Jeremy Thorpe, has had his former male lover executed on Exmoor and got clean away with it. Now the trail of guilt seems to lead higher still, and a ruthless Establishment will stop at nothing to cover its tracks. In a gripping thriller whose cast of real-life characters includes Prime Minister Harold Wilson, his senior adviser Lady Falkender, gay Labour peer Tom Driberg and the investigative journalist Paul Foot, Adam Macqueen plays `what if' with Seventies political history - with a sting in the tail that reminds us that the truth can be just as chilling as fiction.
Adam also writes a ghost story every Christmas for distribution to friends, family and colleagues. They're scary.