Occupation Author, journalist Role Journalist Name Peter Millar | Alma mater University of Oxford Nationality British | |
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Notable works Tomorrow Belongs to Me
1989: The Berlin Wall, My Part in its Downfall
All Gone to Look for America Education Magdalen College, Oxford, University of Oxford Books An Iona Prayer Book, Stealing Thunder, Finding Hope Again, Bleak midwinter, Waymarks | ||
Nominations CWA International Dagger | ||
Peter Millar is a British journalist, critic and author, primarily known for his reporting of the later days of the Cold War and fall of the Berlin Wall .
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Early life
Millar was born in Northern Ireland and educated at Bangor Grammar School, then Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read French and Russian.
Career
Millar was hired by Reuters in 1976 and worked in London and Brussels before being sent from Fleet Street to East Berlin by the news agency, where in the early 1980s he was the only non-German correspondent. Millar also reported on the Solidarity movement in Poland before moving to Warsaw and then Moscow. He joined the The Daily Telegraph before in 1985 moving to the Sunday Telegraph, whose editor Peregrine Worsthorne agreed to Millar's suggestion to give him the role of Central Europe Correspondent: "I persuaded him to let me style myself Central Europe Correspondent, thereby not just inventing a job but revitalising a term – Central Europe – that had been current for centuries but dormant since the onset of the Cold War and the continent's split down an ideological fault line". In 1989, in the run-up to the final stages of The Cold War, Millar moved to The Sunday Times. He was arrested in East Berlin during demonstrations during Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's visit for East Germany's 40th anniversary parades, and was interrogated by the Stasi before being expelled from East Germany. Two weeks later Millar returned to Berlin, however, to witness and report on the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe. One passage Millar wrote for a Sunday Times article, about events as they unfolded in Prague,
A hands-across-Prague protest designed as a human chain became instead a merry dance, a living tableau from a Breughel painting, as laughing, skipping people in warm mufflers and long scarves formed an endless twisting snake through the trees, through the snowy park, up to the floodlit spires, the castle itself and the archbishop's palace, then helter-skelter slithered giggling down steep, slippery, narrow cobbled streets and holding hands with an exaggerated formality, like a pastiche mazurka, passed across the fifteenth-century Charles Bridge, watched by all the statues of all the saints, and on to Wenceslas Square"
was subsequently quoted in its entirety in Martin Gilbert's A History of the Twentieth Century.
Publications
Millar's early books include Tomorrow Belongs to Me, a history of modern Germany, from the fall of Danzig to the fall of the Berlin Wall, that is told through the eyes of a Berlin pub landlord, and two thrillers in English: Stealing Thunder, described by Robert Harris as "an expert blend of nuclear history and international intrigue" and Bleak Midwinter, a thriller based on an outbreak of bubonic plague in modern Oxford. In 2009 1989: The Berlin Wall, My Part in its Downfall was published, a memoir which covers events in Millar's career up to 1989. The Spectator described the book as "a witty, wry, elegiac account of his time as a Reuters and Sunday Times correspondent in Berlin throughout most of the 1980s…Millar's great strength as a reporter is that he mixed with a wide range of ordinary East Germans, drinking Pilsner with them in bars, going for country walks and visiting their homes. He understood they were not an alien species – and also a vital aspect of living under the system Erich Honecker used to describe, with no hint of irony, as 'actually existing Socialism'".
In 2009 Millar's book All Gone to Look for America (Riding the Iron Horse across a Continent and back) was published, an account of a month spent criss-crossing the United States by railway. The book was described by The Daily Telegraph as "for those who love trains, microbrewery beer and the promise of big skies and wide open spaces. Millar's is the kind of journey a lot of mortgage-shackled, middle-aged men dream of: solitary, mildly liberating, comfortable but not too comfortable, adventurous but safely so”. In 2010 Arcadia Books published The Black Madonna, a thriller, loosely in the style of Dan Brown, whom Millar ruthlessly rubbished in his Times review. The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill, published 2011, is an alternative reality thriller which relocated the Berlin Wall to London, imagining a continuation of World War II which ended in Soviet invasion of the southern UK. Returning to non-fiction and the railways, Slow Train to Guantanamo, an amusing and insightful account of travelling the length of Cuba by its antiquated train system as the country begins to undergo sweeping changes in the last days of the Castro brothers' rule was published in August 2013 by Arcadia Books. Millar has translated several German language books into English, including the White Masai series by Corinne Hofmann and Deal With the Devil by Martin Suter. He is also translator of several online books published by Lübbe AG of Cologne, Germany, including Apokalypsis by Mario Giordano.