avg_rating: 4.42
name: Michael   Hingston
about: Michael Hingston tells true stories about seemingly ordinary people forced by circumstances into undertaking extraordinary feats. His book, Into Enemy Arms, published by Grub Street in 2006, recalls a German teenage girl’s struggle against Nazism and how she helped to hide and save a group of Allied Prisoners of War and then accompany them on their dangerous flight out of Germany. One amongst them was his uncle, the man she was destined to fall in love with and marry. In Renegade Hero, published by Pen &amp; Sword in 2011, Michael recounts the six-year secret life and exploits of a Cold War RAF helicopter ace who faked his death by drowning in order to join a clandestine CIA air force in the former Belgian Congo and then go on to run a UN-spons Michael Hingston tells true stories about seemingly ordinary people forced by circumstances into undertaking extraordinary feats. His book, Into Enemy Arms, published by Grub Street in 2006, recalls a German teenage girl’s struggle against Nazism and how she helped to hide and save a group of Allied Prisoners of War and then accompany them on their dangerous flight out of Germany. One amongst them was his uncle, the man she was destined to fall in love with and marry. In Renegade Hero, published by Pen &amp; Sword in 2011, Michael recounts the six-year secret life and exploits of a Cold War RAF helicopter ace who faked his death by drowning in order to join a clandestine CIA air force in the former Belgian Congo and then go on to run a UN-sponsored mercy mission during the Nigerian civil war. Michael covered the pilot’s court martial for desertion when he was working as a journalist in the early seventies. 	Michael is currently working on what he hopes will be his next book - a maritime story which vividly resurrects the long-forgotten heroism of a steamer captain whose bravery made him the toast of the nation. 	A self-proclaimed ‘orphan of the Empire’, Michael was born in British East Africa and spent his childhood in the Kenyan highlands and then in the coastal town of Mombasa. After attending the naval college, HMS Conway, on Anglesey from the age of thirteen, he became an officer cadet in the Merchant Navy before leaving the sea to become a journalist and then public relations consultant. Seven years after founding his own public relations company in London, he took it public and then sold out in order to fulfil a lifelong dream to sail round the world. This he did on his forty-four-foot ketch with his wife, Julia – a circumnavigation of three years during which they had to contend with pirates off Colombia and in the Red Sea.	Since retiring, Michael has lived in the Caribbean and is now settled in south-west France. ...more