ROGER CROFT

According to the bio on Amazon: "Roger Croft was born in Bushey, Hertfordshire, England. After a Dickensian early education at several English private schools, he managed to gain access to Watford Grammar School and later went up to Sheffield University where he read economics and law.

Croft landed his first job in newspapers with London's Daily Mail (then a broadsheet, now a tabloid) under legendary financial (City) editor Patrick Sergeant who taught him the basics of popular journalism. He later worked for The Economist where his immediate boss was then Deputy Editor Roland Bird, later outed as an undercover operative for MI5,the UK'S domestic intelligence service. Croft's stint with the weekly magazine led to a job at the newly-launched Sunday Telegraph where he worked on the financial pages with Nigel Lawson,later to become Margaret Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister).

In the 70s and 80s, Croft travelled to warmer climes: he wrote editorials for the Egyptian Gazette whose absentee editor-in-chief occasionally visited the paper's 'rather decrepit' building in downtown Cairo. Later Michael Barkway, a former BBC correspondent and 'stringer' for The Economist, invited him to help launch the newly-refurbished Financial Times of Canada."