Fallout

In 2001 Andrew Anthony was 39, a successful Observer and Guardian journalist who had just become a father. He was perfectly poised to settle into English middle-class middle-age life. A signed-up member of the liberal left, he'd even spent time supporting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 80s.

There were assumptions that, like wallet and keys, he never left the house without- the greatest menace to world security was America; crime was a function of poverty; Israel was the source of all the troubles in the Middle East. Then came the wake-up call- 9/11. Shocked by the response of liberal friends and colleagues - a belief that America had it coming, a determination to understand the perpetrator rather than support the victim - Anthony was forced to re-examine and unpick his prejudices.

It seemed there were other threats in the world far more malicious and dangerous than America. Could he really go on tolerating the intolerable? The Fall-Out is his memoir, an account of his political education in Thatcher's Britain and the painful midlife reassessment. It shifts from the universal to the personal, the global to the local.