During a long career in journalism, Andy McSmith encountered Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in a Siberian town called Bratsk; dined with Sir Edward Heath in his home in Salisbury; was mugged in the street while visiting Moscow with John Major; and knew Boris Johnson as a colleague with an ambition to be something more than just a journalist. Unusually, though, early in his career he abandoned journalism, to return after more than a decade as a left-wing political activist and playwright. This brought him into close contact with people he would never otherwise have met, including a Trotskyist with a weird millennial vision of the coming revolution, and the strike organiser who brought down leaders of the Polish Communist Party years before the Iron Curtain fell. Working full time for the Labour Party, he knew Gordon Brown and Tony Blair as new MPs, sharing a cramped office in Parliament. Before all that, he was a rebellious teenager who was hanging out with the hippies in San Francisco on the day the Beatles icon George Harrison paid a visit. A host of characters pass through this account of his long life – some highly successful, others not, each recalled in vivid detail.

Can great art be produced in a police state? Josef Stalin ran one of the most oppressive regimes in world history. Nevertheless, Stalinist Russia produced an outpouring of artistic works of immense power. More than a dozen great artists were visible enough for Stalin to take an interest in them - which meant he chose whether they were to live in luxury and be publicly honoured or to be sent to the Lubyanka for torture and execution. Journalist and novelist Andy McSmith brings together the stories of these artists, revealing how they pursued their art, often at great risk.

'Affable, invisible... the man with a brilliant future behind him.' Thus Varsity magazine appraised Kenneth Clarke's term as President of the Cambridge Union in the summer of 1963. Dominated by his opposition to the admission of women students to the Union, Clarke's Presidency had been less than distinguished. But Varsity, like so many commentators throughout Clarke's political career, seriously underestimated a politician who, three decades later, has emerged as a strong man within a weak Conservative administration, often tipped as a possible successor to John Major should the bailiffs be summoned to Number Ten. Clarke, as Andy McSmith explains in this fast-paced and highly readable biography, is above all a survivor who has been a government minister since 1979. Despite his reputation as the 'thinking man's lager lout', Clarke is an old-fashioned 1960s One-Nation Tory who played the tough guy with considerable adroitness in order to survive under Thatcher's hard-line administration. Displaying the same joviality which has seen him sign up for both the Campaign for Social Democracy and the Conservative Club on arrival at Cambridge, Clarke frankly admitted in the 1970s that it was only the arithmetic of Britain's first-past-the-post election system which kept him in the same party as the British nationalists of the Tory right. His pragmatism served him well as he progressed from being the youngest high-flier in the Heath government to the Minister responsible for introducing the highly controversial 'internal market' in the NHS under Thatcher, and now to the happy position of Chancellor of the Exchequer with an economy recovering from recession. Clarke's presence at the heart of the Tory government demonstrates that the mix of free-market liberalism and British nationalism to which Mrs Thatcher gave her name never really took root in the Conservative government. Right-wing Tory rebels who plead that the EC is destroying Britain as a nation-state, or free-market ideologues who want to privitize whatever remains of the welfare state, find Kenneth Clarke an obstacle to their ambitions. From Clarke's point of view, social instability and trade barriers are bad for business. The rise and rise of this most flexible of politicians, according to Andy McSmith's engaging account, may not be enough to stop the cracks in a Tory Party now beyond repair.

Updated since the May 1997 election, Faces of Labour gives a unique insight into a range of Labour politicians in a series of entertaining and revealing portraits. With a substantial lead in the opinion polls, the Labour Party looks set to take over the reins of Britain s government within a year. Ironically, just at the point when Labour appears to be a government in waiting, it has never been more difficult to judge exactly what we can expect from Labour in government. New slogans and buzz words appear on almost a daily basis, as the Labour Party continues to redefine itself after two decades in opposition. In Faces of Labour Andy McSmith brings an expert eye to bear on the enormous changes Labour has undergone on the long road back to Number 10. A former party press officer and now a political correspondent for the Observer, few people are better qualified than Andy McSmith to give an account-both as an insider and as a critical observer-of what is really going on in the Labour Party. McSmith describes the transition from a party dominated by the radical left into a social democratic party. He reassesses the tensions between Old and New Labour, focusing on individuals whose careers throw different aspects of a complex story into sharp relief. McSmith gives a sharp insider's account of the key figures in the Labour hierarchy, including Peter Mandelson-the man described as Tony Blair's Rasputin-John Prescott, Robin Cook, Clare Short and, of course, Tony Blair himself. He also looks at those on the underside of the party-figures such as Ted Grant, guru of the Militant Tendency, and the late Jim Murray, a Tyneside shop steward who, by combination of pure chance and the power of the block vote, once held the future of Labour in his hands. Faces of Labour is crammed with the kind of telling detail available only to a writer who has observed his subject from close up. If you want to know what to expect from the New Labour government, this lively and accessible book is an indispensable guide.

The 1980s was the revolutionary decade of the twentieth century. To look back in 1990 at the Britain of ten years earlier was to look into another country. The changes were not superficial, like the revolution in fashion and music that enlivened the 1960s; nor were they quite as unsettling and joyless as the troubles of the 1970s. And yet they were irreversible. By the end of the decade, society as a whole was wealthier, money was easier to borrow, there was less social upheaval, less uncertainty about the future. Perhaps the greatest transformation of the decade was that by 1990, the British lived in a new ideological universe where the defining conflict of the twentieth century, between capitalism and socialism, was over. Thatcherism took the politics out of politics and created vast differences between rich and poor, but no expectation that the existence of such gross inequalities was a problem that society or government could solve - because as Mrs Thatcher said, 'There is no such thing as society ... people must look to themselves first.' From the Falklands war and the miners' strike to Bobby Sands and the Guildford Four, from Diana and the New Romantics to Live Aid and the 'big bang', from the Rubik's cube to the ZX Spectrum, McSmith's brilliant narrative account uncovers the truth behind the decade that changed Britain forever.