The Hostage Handbook - Softcover

'How did he get through his captivity - Sheer willpower - and although he has suffered from post traumatic stress disorder at times, 40 years on Mr Grey has taken a lot of positives from his ordeal.' Jon Welch, Eastern Daily Press. Grey's experience, through fear, false hope, deep depression, suicidal thoughts and outrage at the failure of the British government to secure his release, is painfully similar to those of his later colleagues in Beirut and Baghdad - Mercifully he came home to sunlight and love - and lived on to work for the BBC and write exciting novels.' Robert Fisk, The Independent. This real time journal of two years captivity gives a vivid picture of the afflictions and frustrations he faced and the often mindless and inhumane behaviour of his captors - But it also reveals Tony's stubborn capacity for inventiveness and imagination, which created an inner space for his spirit's survival in spite of all.' Sir John Weston, Britain's former ambassador to the UN and NATO.

The Hostage Handbook presents the highly charged verbatim transcription of the text of the author's secret shorthand diaries which he wrote and kept hidden during his period of two years and two months solitary confinement as a hostage in China. The reader receives a powerful sense of feeling what it was like, moment by moment, to be held hostage in isolation in a hostile land. He says he now sees the two harrowing years held in a slogan daubed house in the heart of Beijing as ' a huge delayed action privilege' and realises, more than three decades later, how the insights provided by that experience - and the very act of keeping those secret diaries themselves - helped shape his life positively after his release. He has been an avid journal keeper ever since and in an accompanying commentary he extols the virtues of that reflective discipline.