Michael Dobbs was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and educated at the University of York, with fellowships at Princeton and Harvard. He is a reporter for the Washington Post, where he spent much of his career as a foreign correspondent covering the collapse of communism. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
Although Dobbs, like other historians, chooses to tell this story through the personalities of the four leaders, he nonetheless accepts that history sometimes follows an internal logic that is bewildering to those caught up in its contradictory currents but makes complete sense from a distance. (5 star review) * Daily Express * Dobbs' hour-by-hour overview is a worthy study of this much mythologised fortnight . . . Dobbs' chronological approach not only provides a natural sense of pace, but also allows him to illustrate the near-fatal time lag in communication between the two sides * Time Out * [Dobbs] has made extensive use of untapped archive material to reveal the secrets of the cloak-and-dagger operations behind the nuclear stand-off in the Caribbean . . . Excellent -- John Crossland * Daily Mail *