Stewart Hennessey lives with his wife and two children in the Scottish Borders, close to the village where he grew up. He has also lived in Glasgow, London, Moscow, Edinburgh, Jerusalem, the South of France and The Pentland Hills. He divides his time between ghostwriting, copywriting, a friend's property business, fiction-writing, parenting and desperately trying to find time to paraglide.

As a child, Hennessey was a Catholic altar boy, an academic prodigy and a chess champion. As an adolescent he wasn't any of these things. In fact Hennessey was 'asked to leave' school. This would have pleased him enormously had he not then had to attend another school in order to gain entry to university. At university he duly spent a few years studying the NME and chasing women or, as it is also known, acquiring an arts degree.

He then went on to journalism, and once found himself carrying an AK-47 for two days on the Thai-Burma border. He later wrote a protest letter to the Government of Burma, accusing them of cowardice for not showing up for a scrap while he was armed. Fortunately, his wife is a psychotherapist.

Perfectly in tune with the twenty-first century, Hennessey believes duelling should be legalised; Facebook and Twitter rot the soul and pave the way to Orwellian hell; one cannot change sex regardless of how loudly one shrieks about one's 'identity'; the big thick line between indoctrination and education is being blurred by wokery; and Sergeant Pepper is a wildly over-rated album. Hennessey is deeply concerned about the climate; he believes it is far too cold in Scotland.

His heroes are also very fashionable. He believes Horace had a golden mind; Tacitus was silver-tongued; Daniel Defoe was a social-climbing, grasping, duplicitous bastard, and yet somehow a great guy; GK Chesterton, CS Lewis and George Orwell were moral giants; Neil Hannon is up there with George Gershwin; Julian of Norwich, Mikhail Lermontov, William Wordsworth, Dante Alighieri, Feodor Dostoevsky, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Gabriel Fauré, Neil Armstrong, Modest Mussorgsky and Jean Sibelius all sit on the right side of God; and Kate Bush should make more records.

In Print:-

At Scotland on Sunday newspaper, Hennessey was part of the editorial team which twice won British Newspaper of the Year, and he was Foreign Editor of the Year on a separate occasion.

Other journalistic highlights are more ambivalent. The all-time record for most letters of complaint to Scotland on Sunday was achieved by Hennessey, for a feature about a Scottish Nationalist Party conference. One lone voice did defend him, on the Mencken principle that "journalist is to politician as dog is to lamp-post." And on the less wholesome but interesting principle: "Party apparatchiks who write letters to newspapers are all scum who should die."

When writing for The Independent newspaper he was brought to the attention of the Press Complaints Commission, and he was successfully sued by Club 18-30 for slurring their good name (!) in The Scotsman newspaper.

Hennessey does not believe that the former Soviet Union inculcated a culture of barking mad paranoiacs... BUT... while reporting for The Times in Ukraine, an entire cult (White Brotherhood) declared he was a spy and an assassin, and thus they were compelled to kill him. He was again accused of being a spy in remote, northern Russia, where a tub-thumping old Stalinist imprisoned him for a few hours: striking a symbolic blow for the capitalist West, Hennessey bravely bribed his way out. The accusations of spying were ironic since, in Moscow, Hennessey had been courted by the FSB (successors of the KGB) who refused to believe that a journalist could be as far removed from power and influence as Hennessey most definitely was.

Most heroically, on behalf of The Observer newspaper, Hennessey once stayed awake throughout an entire U2 concert. He still has nightmares.

Despite success in Scotland with his debut novel, Drowning in the Shallows, a contemporary satire, Hennessey's publisher, Headline (an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton) rejected Comrade Fox without reading a word; on the basis that a comedy set in the Russian Revolution was unmarketable. Two big shot literary agents subsequently failed to engage the interest of a single publisher for the same reason. Being not at all bloody-minded, Hennessey wrote the novel anyway and published it through Amazon. And then penned a sequel, Smiting the Bear, and a short story prequel, Between Heidi and Horor: A Brief Memoir of the Somme.

Hennessey drives an Alfa Romeo 159, which is very cool of him. Some weeks it needs no repairs at all.