John Hooper is currently the Rome correspondent for the Economist and the Guardian Born in 1950 Hooper was educated at St Benedict s Abbey in London and St Catharine s College Cambridge At the age of eighteen he travelled to Biafra during the Nigerian civil war to make a television documentary Since then he has spent than 20 years as a foreign correspondent working for among others the Economist the Guardian the Observer BBC NBC and Reuters For several years in London he was a presenter of BBC World Service s Twenty Four Hours current affairs programme. John Hooper is currently the Rome correspondent for the Economist and the Guardian Born in 1950 Hooper was educated at St Benedict s Abbey in London and St Catharine s College Cambridge At the age of eighteen he travelled to Biafra during the Nigerian civil war to make a television documentary Since then he has spent than 20 years as a foreign correspondent working for among others the Economist the Guardian the Observer BBC NBC and Reuters For several years in London he was a presenter of BBC World Service s Twenty Four Hours current affairs programme. For three years he covered Spain s eventful transformation from a dictatorship into a democracy That posting and another from 1988 to 1994 produced two books on Spain for Penguin The Spaniards which won the Allen Lane award for 1987 and its successor The New Spaniards In 1997 he uncovered the so called ship of death migrant trafficking disaster and was a member of the award winning Observer team that investigated its aftermath site_link Direct democracy can no longer be thought of as something that belongs to the future This is the scarcely believable story of how in just over three years a political dotcom grew to become one of the most powerful forces in the affairs of a country of 60 million people At the general election in Italy this year Beppe Grillo s Five Star Movement which has its headquarters on a web site took a quarter of the vote than Silvio Berlusconi s party Such is the weight of Grillo s following in the new parliament that his movement was able to block the formation of a new government paralyzing the politics of the nation for than two months In a fast moving narrative John Hooper tells the story of how an unlikely partnership between an angry exhibitionist comedian and a retiring web consultant took Italy by storm Drawing on extensive interviews with Grillo and his publicity shy co founder Gianroberto Casaleggio he looks at the reasons for the Five Star Movement s giddying rise and highlights both its revolutionary aspirations and inherent contradictions He considers whether Grillo is as the German magazine Der Spiegel branded him the most dangerous man Europe or the pioneer of a digital transformation that will change all of our lives John Hooper is Italy Correspondent of the Economist and Southern Europe Editor of the Guardian He has reported for almost 25 years from the countries of the Mediterranean His book The Spaniards since revised and updated as The New Spaniards won the Allen Lane Award for a best first work of non fiction Hooper is also the author of the bestselling Kindle Single Fatal Voyage which tells the story of the wrecking of the Costa Concordia and was described in The New York Times as equal parts thriller and elegy Alien Landing Beppe Grillo and the Advent of Dotcom PoliticsMy Italian colleague has been telling me all about Beppe Grillo for the past few years This short history of his M5S movement s political rise from obscurity to a major player is informative and interesting John Hooper

Librarian Note There is than one author in the Goodreads database with this name, For three years he covered Spain s eventful transformation from a dictatorship Librarian Note There is than one author in the Goodreads database with this name