Killing My Own Snakes: A Memoir

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She later specialised in show business: notable encounters followed involving stars like Steve McQueen, Georges Balanchine, David Niven, Tom Jones, John Cassavetes, James Mason, Marc Bolan and Salvador Dali. Leslie had attended the course to get the other side of the story after interviewing those high priestesses of women's lib Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem (they hated each other, incidentally). I don’t talk about what students deserve or earn, simply about what helps me teach and others learn.

Now, please don’t think me impolite with what I’m about to say, but it may be easier if we just face the facts head-on.

In David Randall’s book The Great Reporters (celebrating the 13 greatest British and American journalists of all time), the author profiled Ann Leslie as ‘the most versatile reporter ever.

At a time when journalists are ever-more pressured to see the world through Google, Leslie's career is a testament to the narcotic of running towards the fire and seeing the story for yourself.Her mother was living proof of the need for feminism: an extremely intelligent woman, "considered a beauty and a wit", barred from pursuing a career simply by her gender. The story of how this happened is studded with the best pound-for-pound anecdotes you'll find anywhere. I take their damn cellphones away, giving myself extra points if I can swipe it from under their nose without signaling intent.

The former chapters include accounts of Leslie's childhood in India and Pakistan during the last days of the Raj and the first days of independence (including a wince-making description of the ghastly treatment she had to have, as a child, after being bitten by a possibly rabid dog), which seems to have given her that sense of old colonial rootlessness that propelled her around the globe in her career. Ann Leslie has been one of our top journalists for over three decades and has come across a myriad of people in her time. As I invariably mention when going through the syllabus, the only action a student can take to earn a permanent black mark is deliberate cruelty to another student. Read more about the condition Very Good: A book that has been read and does not look new, but is in excellent condition. Her considerable charm and intelligence have not only taken her to the peak of her trade; they have managed to get her into places that other journalists can only look at with envy – such as into Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev's private apartments during a summit meeting, or around Imelda Marcos's shoe cupboard.There is a great deal of name dropping, particularly in the early chapters - inevitable I suppose, given Ann was Show Business editor, but it becomes tedious and uninteresting. In the recent Reuters/Press Gazette launch of the Newspaper Hall of Fame she was listed as one of the forty most influential journalists in the last forty years. In many ways, my classroom environment is a progressive’s dream, the kind of place that Ed Boland dreamed of having before he realized he hated students. After graduating she began her career at the Manchester office of the Daily Express , where the news editor took an instant dislike to her—she was a southerner, educated and—worst of all—female. On the trail of heroin traffickers in the Mexican badlands, "As I trudged up the hill, a band of moustachioed trafficantes leapt.