CECIL HARMSWORTH KING was famous for three things: publishing the Daily Mirror in its heyday; attempting to engineer a 'coup' against the Government in 1968; and publishing hs inhscreet and caustic (though not always scintillating) diaries in the early 1970s. Hugh Cudlipp was also famous for three things: being the most successhl British tabloid edtor and editorial director of all time (measured in longevity as well as circulation); organising the 'assassination' of Cecil King; and writing what are perhaps the two best memoirs by a Fleet Street editor, Publish and Be Damned! The Astonishing Story of the Daily Mirror (1953) and Walking on the Water (1976).

This feline account of the marriage of convenience behind one of the great media success stories of the twentieth century started out as a biography of King alone, but Ruth Dudley Edwards gradually realised that it would be m& interesting (and honest) to write a dual biography of Cudlipp and