Books like not in your lifetime

Anthony Bruce Summers (born 21 December 1942) is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of eight best-selling non-fiction books.

Summers is an Irish citizen, and has been working for more than twenty years with Robbyn Swan, who is his co-author and fourth wife. After studying modern languages at Oxford University, his early work took him from labouring jobs to freelance reporting to London newspapers, to Granada TV's World in Action – the UK's first tabloid public affairs programme, to writing the news for the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, then back to England to the BBC's 24 Hours, a pioneering late evening show that brought viewers coverage from all over the world. Summers became the BBC's youngest producer at 24, travelling worldwide and sending filmed reports from the conflicts in Vietnam and the Middle East, and across Latin America. A main focus, though, was on the momentous events of the 1960s and '70s in the United States – with on-the-spot reports on Martin Luther King's assassination and on Robert F. Kennedy's bid for the presidency. He smuggled cameras into the then Soviet Union to obtain the only TV interview with dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov – when he was under house arrest, having just won the Nobel Prize. Before moving on from the BBC, Summers became an Assistant Editor of the prestigious weekly programme Panorama. Long based in Ireland, he has since the mid-'70s concentrated on investigative non-fiction, usually taking from four to five years to produce a book – conducting in-depth research, combining digging in the documentary record with exhaustive interviewing.