"This is the record of a long and risk-strewn life. From Winchester, where he occasionally flummoxed the authorities, Michael Burn won a classics scholarship to Oxford, pulled out from there, dabbled in high and sometimes less high life, and in 1933, troubled by the social injustice that attended mounting unemployment, went to Germany to weigh up the ideals of National Socialism. He met Hitler, who signed a copy of Mein Kampf for him (it obligingly disappeared through a hole in the floor of the author's car), was shown Dachau concentration camp, was a guest at the Nuremberg party rally, and for a few months fell for some aspects of the giant falsehood. Then, disenchanted, he was taken on by Geoffrey Dawson at The Times just as the Abdication crisis was beginning to throw into confusion the ascending Victorian code of public behaviour - 'amoral, immoral, moral, and Balmoral.'" "Dawson sent him to report the triumphant six-week progress of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in Canada and the United States, and suggested that he might return to be trained as Washington Correspondent. But Germany was on the move. Unconvinced by Dawson's trust in appeasement, the author had already joined the Territorial Army; and he later volunteered for the Commandos. He took part in the assault on St. Nazaire, where he won the MC, was taken prisoner and spent the rest of the war in Colditz. Here he shorthanded the BBC news on a secret wireless set, lectured on Marxism, took the Oxford degree he had shirked while an undergraduate, and wrote two books - one rather confidently described by the Daily Worker as 'the greatest of the war', and the other a fantasy in verse reproduced here as an Appendix." "After the war The Times sent him as staff correspondent, first to Vienna, where he successfully made friends with the supposedly unapproachable Soviet journalists, and then to Budapest with responsibility for the Balkans. He had to report the faked trial of Cardinal Mindszenty, which presented him as a champion of democratic liberty. The Times history fairly describes his time in Budapest as 'an exercise' in honesty'." "After leaving the Times, he moved with his wife, Mary, to Wales, where he wrote books, plays and verse and entered into an unexpectedly precarious business venture concerned with mussels. But the concluding chapters are in essence his love-story with Mary, the more unusual because he was predominantly homosexual (an early relationship with Guy Burgess has attracted rather disproportionate attention). Even allowing for the fact that his wife was by any standards an exceptional woman, it is a remarkable analysis of a profound relationship. Turned towards the Sun has many different facets: it is witty, intelligent, sometimes bruisingly frank, principled and oddly affecting."--BOOK JACKET.