Thriller writer Michael Marshall believes murderers are made, but are only acting within their animal instincts, writes Tom Foot

MICHAEL Marshall lives up to all expectations of a thriller writer.
Armed with a crumpled soft-top packet of cigarettes, a copy of his book under arm and scowling at the midday sun, the author of Blood of Angels appeared a little distant – probably still unremoved from his work and with a hundred new plot lines in mind.
After completing seven novels in ten years, it is clear Marshall’s world requires his complete concentration.
His latest work is the last instalment of the writer’s fantasy/crime trilogy. Set in Los Angeles, Blood of Angels is a tense, suspense-packed follow up to the internationally best selling thrillers The Straw Men and The Lonely Dead.
The trilogy marked a departure from his past science fiction, with which he made his name.
That departure signalled a new identity for Marshall – previously known as Michael Marshall Smith he became Michael Marshall.

While in prison for libel the poet Leigh Hunt continued to edit his newspaper, The Examiner, and lambasted the evils of the 19th-century establishment writes Gerald Isaaman

HE loved Hampstead. And he moved into his humble cottage beneath a clump of elms in winding West End Lane, West Hampstead, on October 10, 1812, living next to the family farm of the Brawnes, where Fanny Brawne, later to become Keats’ lover, was born.
On February 3 the following year poet Leigh Hunt was in stinking Surrey Jail, Southwark, convicted by a special jury and condemned to two years, fines and securities that broke the future financial security of his life, labelled an enemy of the establishment.
His crime – and that of his brother John, sent on a similar sentence to notorious Coldbath Fields Prison, Clerkenwell – was to libel the Prince Regent repeatedly in their radical newspaper, The Examiner, which championed liberty and cried for the freedom of the press as it mocked and taunted the government.
“The country ought to lift up its voice against the vices of the sovereign,” declared Leigh Hunt, then aged 28, and today, alas, a lost and forgotten hero who, despite his fragile health and stutter, had the rock solid resilience to fight for justice and progress on all fronts.