‘I think every man is his own Pygmalion, and spends his life fashioning himself,’ I F Stone once wrote. ‘And in fashioning himself, for good or ill, he fashions the human race.’ As D D Guttenplan reveals in his fascinating new biography of this irrepressible investigative journalist and radical provocateur, no phrase better describes a man whose nearly four-decade-long career in American journalism was marked by a transformation from insider to exile and back again, and whose character was built through adversity.

Izzy Stone’s name first appeared in national bylines as a young journalist and self-styled conscience of the New Deal, writing in the New York Post, The Nation and the short-lived wartime newspaper PM. He is known principally for his clarion calls against Nazism, but his reputation has been