TAYLOR, Peter 1942-

PERSONAL: Born 1942, in England.

ADDRESSES: Home—London, England. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 38 Soho Square, London W1D 3HB, England.

CAREER: Television journalist and author. ITV, London, England, world correspondent for This Week (news program); British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC), London, reporter for Panorama (television news magazine). His more than fifty documentaries include Death in the West, Brits, Provos, Loyalists, True Spies, and Remember Bloody Sunday.

AWARDS, HONORS: Cobden Trust Award, 1980, for Beating the Terrorists?; Judge's Award, Royal Television Society, 1995, for lifetime achievement; Judge's Journalism Award, Royal Television Society, 2001, for Provos, Loyalists, and Brits trilogy; named journalist of the year, Royal Television Society, 2003; Orwell Prize shortlist, for Brits.

WRITINGS:

Beating the Terrorists? Interrogation at Omagh,Gough, and Castlereagh, Penguin (New York, NY), 1980.

Smoke Ring: The Politics of Tobacco, Bodley Head (London, England), 1984, published as The Smoke Ring: Tobacco, Money, and Multinational Politics, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1984.

Stalker: The Search for Truth, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1987.

Families at War: Voices from the Troubles, BBC Books (London, England), 1989.

States of Terror: Democracy and Political Violence, BBC Books (London, England), 1993.

Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1998, published as Behind the Mask: The Ira and Sinn Fein, TV Books (New York, NY), 1998, revised edition, 1999.

Loyalists: War and Peace in Northern Ireland, TV Books (New York, NY), 1999.

Brits: The War against the IRA, Bloomsbury (London, England), 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: Long-time British television journalist Peter Taylor is best known for his work documenting the conflict in Northern Ireland. His TV documentary trilogy on the paramilitary and military operations in Ulster, also adapted as the books Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein, Loyalists: War and Peace in Northern Ireland, and Brits: The War against the IRA, looks at the events from the viewpoints of the three participants. "What sets [Taylor's] work apart is the access he gets," wrote Guardian reviewer Robin Hunt, "and an interviewing style that elicits what are, in effect, confessions."

Taylor has also produced a television program on the tobacco industry, a documentary series that became one of his first books, The Smoke Ring: Tobacco, Money, and Multinational Politics, which was called an "engaging, sprightly, yet well-documented exposé of the tobacco industry's struggle to protect sales" by Alex Raskin in the Los Angeles Times. In the book, Taylor documents the manner in which tobacco companies colluded to keep antismoking information from the public and how it used advertising and sales positioning in third-world countries to build a dependent consumer base for its products. Nation contributor D. D. Guttenplan called Taylor's exposé a "lucidly written, eloquently argued book."

Taylor's first book on the Northern Ireland conflict—or "the Troubles," as those in Britain often refer to it—was the 1980 work Beating the Terrorists? Interrogation in Omagh, Gough, and Castlereagh. The paperback spin-off of a Thames Television series, Taylor's book investigates the process by which confessions by IRA members were secured. According to Keith Kyle in the Listener, Taylor calls attention to "the extreme likelihood that abuses were occurring" at the facilities mentioned in the book's subtitle. "It is the great value of Peter Taylor's book that, by careful research, he builds up the detail of a large number of individual cases," Kyle further noted. Taylor takes another oblique view at the hostilities in his Families at War: Voices from the Troubles, which explores the conflict from the voices of "grieving families on both sides," as Genevieve Stuttaford commented in Publishers Weekly. The suffering of all concerned is, according to Stuttaford, "revealed . . . in these moving personal expression[s]."

Taylor continued to spin-off books from his television documentaries. In States of Terror: Democracy and Political Violence, he investigates international terrorism and the means by which modern states respond to it. Provos, Loyalists, and Brits formed a trilogy that delineates the Troubles from all sides. The first in the series, Provos (published in the United States as Behind the Mask: The Ira and Sinn Fein), "chronicles the evolution of the conflict and the IRA campaign," according to Fintan O'Toole in the New York Review of Books, from 1972's Bloody Sunday, when supposedly unarmed marchers were fired upon by British soldiers, through the next several decades to the time of the peace talks. For O'Toole, "especially strong are the sections dealing with the early Troubles."

The book is made up largely of interviews with IRA members, as well as British troops and intelligence personnel, politicians, and those civilians caught between the fighting factions. A contributor for the Economist felt that "Provos commands respect not least because [Taylor] has long since established his reputation as an impartial reporter and a merciless interviewer of British and Irish politicians." Writing in the Washington Post Book World, Fred Barbash pointed out that Taylor "takes special note . . . of various American organizations which have provided financial and political support to Sinn Fein, under the pretense that somehow they are not supporting terrorism." Reviewing the television production for the Boston Globe, Michael Blowen felt that Taylor "clarifies a story of immense complexity without oversimplification." Also writing on the television production, Atlanta Constitution contributor Phil Kloer called the work a "remarkable act of journalism," and Guardian reviewer John Mullin dubbed it a "scintillating series."

In Loyalists, Taylor tells the story from the point of view of the Protestant Northern Irish paramilitary groups. The book follows the same format as Taylor's other works about the Troubles: extensive interviews linked by narrative history. For Jo Thomas, writing in the New York Times Book Review, "one of the best features of [Taylor's] work is its precision." Noting that Taylor brings decades of access to the major players in the conflict, Thomas further noted that Taylor "provides exact dates and details in the complicated tapestry he weaves." Thomas found Taylor's writing style "workmanlike" but observed that "the book has gems from the loyalists themselves, who clearly came to trust him." Nation contributor Roane Carey noted that Taylor "follows the general format of his excellent Behind the Mask: The IRA and Sinn Fein, interweaving history and interviews to convey the Protestant community's centuries-old siege mentality."

Taylor's tried-and-true format is again applied to Brits, the final installment in the trilogy, which is told from the viewpoint of the British players such as soldiers and intelligence agents. Taylor "guides the reader through the maze of acronyms, factions, rivalries, propaganda and disinformation," Chris Petit noted in a Guardian review of the book. He also "emphasizes the general lack of comprehension on the part of the British," Petit added. Similarly, Maurice Walsh, writing in the New Statesman, observed that "confusion was at the heart of the British response to Northern Ireland." For Walsh, the "intelligence war . . . provides Taylor's richest material. . . . What is remarkable about Taylor's extraordinary contacts and his lengthy interviews is how the intelligence campaign was almost a private war in which larger questions of nationalism, sovereignty or even politics rarely intruded."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), October 21, 1997, Phil Kloer, review of Behind the Mask: The Ira and Sinn Fein, p. E04.

Boston Globe, October 21, 1997, Michael Blowen, review of Behind the Mask, p. C1.

Current History, March, 1998, Douglas Watson, review of Behind the Mask, pp. 137-138.

Economist, January 24, 1998, review of Provos: TheIRA and Sinn Fein, pp. 81-82.

Guardian (Manchester, England), November 15, 1993, Robin Hunt, "Behind the Barricades: A Reporter Pursues the Human Face of World Terrorism"; January 14, 1994, Nancy Banks-Smith, "A Naked Terror"; September 23, 1997, John Mullin, "The Man Who Got Inside the IRA: Peter's Television Reports Have Been the Most Revealing of the Troubles. But Even They Were Nothing on His Latest Scoop," p. 9; September 25, 1997, John Redmond, review of Provos, p. 9; October 1, 1997, Desmond Christy, review of Provos, p. T19; October 8, 1997, Danny Morrison, "Bridge over the Troubles: Republican Activist Danny Morrison Gives His Take on Peter Taylor's Controversial TV Documentary about the IRA and Sinn Fein," p. T13; March 29, 2000, Matt Wells, "BBC Braced for Row over Series on Intelligence War in Ulster," p. 8; July 7, 2001, Chris Petit, review of Brits: The War against the IRA, p. 9; June 5, 2002, Jonathan Freedland, "Bringing Peace out of the Shadows: Veterans of the Conflicts in the Middle East and Northern Ireland Seek to Make the Impossible Possible," p. 17.

Irish Voice (New York, NY), November 4, 1997, Laoise MacReamoinn, review of Behind the Mask, p. 23.

Listener, November 27, 1980, Keith Kyle, review of Beating the Terrorists? Interrogation at Omagh, Gough, and Castlereagh, pp. 730-731.

Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1985, Alex Raskin, review of The Smoke Ring: Tobacco, Money, and Multinational Politics, p. 14.

Nation, November 17, 1984, D. D. Guttenplan, review of The Smoke Ring, p. 528; July 12, 1999, Roane Carey, review of Loyalists: War and Peace in Northern Ireland, pp. 30-34.

New Statesman, August 6, 2001, Maurice Walsh, review of Brits, p. 42.

New York Review of Books, February 19, 1988, Fintan O'Toole, review of Behind the Mask, p. 9.

New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1998, Warren Hoge, review of Behind the Mask, p. 18; November 21, 1999, Jo Thomas, review of Loyalists, p. 18.

Publishers Weekly, October 5, 1990, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Families at War, pp. 86-87.

Times Literary Supplement, May 1, 1998, Eunam O'Halpin, review of Provos.

Washington Post Book World, April 19, 1998, Fred Barbash, review of Behind the Mask, p. X6.

ONLINE

BBC Online,http://news.bbc.co.uk/ (March 1, 2001), "BBC News Sweeps the Board at RTS Journalism Awards"; (June 11, 2002), "Journalist Refuses to Reveal Sources"; (February 27, 2003), "BBC News Wins at Royal Television Society Awards."

Bloomsbury Publishing Web site,http://www.bloomsbury.com/ (January 26, 2004).*