Journalism, and Adventures Behind The Iron Curtain
Williams' British paperback publishers would claim that his first-hand experience of adventure and intrigue was put to superb use in his novels.
As a student he took part in the Hungarian uprising. He took a supply of penicillin to the insurgents in Budapest. He masqueraded his way into East Germany when that country was virtually closed. He was a delegate from Cambridge to the World Festival of Peace and Friendship in Warsaw where he and some friends smuggled a Polish student to the West.
After graduating from Cambridge, Williams worked for Radio Free Europe in Munich. He then moved on to print journalism, starting at the Western Mail. He then joined The Guardian before becoming foreign correspondent for The Daily Express, covering international wars and "other horrors".
He covered stories in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Israel and the Far East. As a reporter he covered most of the world's trouble spots - Vietnam, the Middle-East, Algeria, Czechoslovakia, Ulster, Mozambique, Cyprus and Rhodesia.
He covered two Israeli-Arab conflicts including the Six-Day War.
In Algeria, the Foreign Office received complaints about him from both the French Army and the Arabs. Subsequently he had to be smuggled out of the country after the word barbouze (spy) had been written on his car, In Beirut, he encountered Kim Philby the day before the latter disappeared to Moscow.
His Vietnam reporting won him much praise. Jon Bradshaw called him "perhaps the best observer of war in England. His articles on Vietnam are far and away the best pieces produced in Britain on the subject." According to Phillip Knightley, correspondents sewed their official identification tags - name and organisation - on their jackets. However, Williams' press accreditation tag carried an unintended connotation, which raised eyebrows: Alan Williams, Queen, though "it was to the disbelief of most GIs" wrote Phillip Knightley.
Journalist and war correspondant Nicholas Tomalin, described Williams as his wildest friend. Williams based a character in The Beria Papers on Tomalin and, upon selling the film rights, told Tomalin that he should play himself in the movie version.
Read more about this topic: Alan Williams (novelist)
Famous quotes containing the words adventures, iron and/or curtain:
“We had no revolutions to fear, nor fatigues to undergo; all our adventures were by the fireside, and all our migrations from the blue bed to the brown.”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774)
“The greatest, or rather the most prominent, part of this city was constructed with the design to offer the deadest resistance to leaden and iron missiles that might be cast against it. But it is a remarkable meteorological and psychological fact, that it is rarely known to rain lead with much violence, except on places so constructed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)