For Whom the Bell Tolls: Light and Dark Verse

Martin Bell OBE has been many things - an icon of BBC war reporting, Britain’s first independent MP for 50 years, a UNICEF ambassador, and ‘the man in the white suit’ - a tireless campaigner for honesty and accountability in politics. But as his new book reveals, he’s also a poet of light verse, and here Bell’s poems continue his war by other means on duplicitous politicians, our all-consuming media, the venality of celebrity culture and much more. The earliest poem here was written when Martin was 19; the most recent will cover as-yet-unknown key events of 2011. Oscillating between trenchant satire and touching honesty, often poignant autobiography spiced with gentle humour, Bell presents poems on Tony Blair and Iraq, on Radovan Karadzic, the Serbian war criminal whom he met on trial in the Hague, on his hero, Reuters reporter Kurt Schork, killed on assignment in Sierra Leone, and colourful episodes from his work and life, from the chart-topping calypso written about him in St Lucia to his being a guest at Idi Amin’s wedding: ‘ .that by God / Was well worth doing, if distinctly odd. 'Topical, timely and with Martin’s irrepressible guiding voice, For Whom the Bell Tolls will be the perfect fireside companion this Christmas, from the man convinced that 'life begins at three score years and ten.