Four decades reporting from the Cold War's frontlines and its long aftermath — for the ICRC, AFP, the Financial Times, and Bloomberg. Now writing the stories that never made the wire.
Life on both sides of the Cold War frontline. Paperback, audiobook, and signed copies coming soon.
Buy on Amazon
Memoirs from the pitch, the dressing room and the pub. Football anecdotes from the 1970s from Scotland and beyond and life after playing.
How I coped with friends of Brigitte and other acquaintances and my working-from-home life along the coast from Nice to the Bay of St Tropez.
The Marquis de Sade returns to face trial for crimes against humanity.
New book announcements and ongoing writing, straight from John.
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In 1983, a young Scottish journalist was sent to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border for the International Committee of the Red Cross — the first posting in a career that would carry him through four decades of the conflicts, collapses, and quiet negotiations that shaped the world after the Cold War.
From Soviet POW handovers on the Afghan frontier to the Ethiopian famine and Soviet Spetsnaz in Mekele; from the townships of apartheid-era Johannesburg to the siege of Sarajevo and the fall of Yugoslavia; from the Financial Times foreign desk to Bloomberg's Middle East bureau in the year Princess Diana died — John McKay was rarely at the centre of the story. He was below the radar of it: close enough to matter, never quite in the frame.
Below the Radar is a memoir built from contemporaneous notebooks, field reports, and forty years of journalism, tracing one life through the last chapter of the Cold War and the uneasy peace that followed.
John McKay is a British journalist and editor born in Lennox Castle, Stirlingshire, in 1955. He trained as a journalist in Scotland before joining Agence France-Presse in Paris in 1978, and the ICRC in Geneva in 1982 as editor of the ICRC Bulletin, with field missions to Pakistan-Afghanistan and Ethiopia.
He later reported from Southern Africa for AFP, worked the Foreign Desk at the Financial Times, served as Bloomberg News's Weekend Editor for Europe and the Middle East, and spent seventeen years as editor of LNG Journal. He now lives in Cambridge.
Below the Radar is his first book.
Before Below the Radar, John spent four decades on the other side of the editorial desk — editing the ICRC Bulletin in Geneva, serving as Bloomberg News's Weekend Editor for Europe and the Middle East, and running LNG Journal for seventeen years. He now offers that same editorial eye to memoirists and nonfiction writers preparing a manuscript for agents, publishers, or self-publication.
Every manuscript gets a full, honest read from someone who has actually sat on the other side of the desk — with particular experience in memoir, journalism, and reportage-based nonfiction.
Prices below are indicative. Each engagement is confirmed individually, with its own written quotation and terms, before any work begins.
A full editorial report on your opening chapters — enough to know whether the manuscript is working before committing to a full assessment. Cost is deducted from a full assessment if you go on to book one.
A complete read and a written editorial report covering structure, pacing, voice, and what a reader will take away — with clear, prioritised recommendations for revision. Turnaround typically 3–4 weeks. £0.006/word over 80,000 words.
A hands-on, sentence-level pass through the manuscript — tightening prose, clarity, and voice throughout. Typically follows a manuscript assessment, once the structural work is settled.
A detailed critique of your query letter and synopsis before you approach agents or publishers, drawing on experience of what actually gets a manuscript read.
Tell us about your manuscript — genre, length, and which service you're interested in.
A written quote confirming scope, timeline, deliverables, and terms.
You confirm you're happy to proceed on those terms.
An invoice is issued for the agreed fee.
Once payment is complete, your manuscript is submitted and work begins.
Your report or edit is delivered within the agreed timeline.
No manuscript needed yet — just tell us about your book and what you're looking for, and we'll come back with a written quote.
Typically 3–4 weeks from submission, depending on manuscript length and current workload. To confirm: is 3–4 weeks accurate, or should this change based on real turnaround once you're taking submissions?
Particular experience with memoir, journalism, and reportage-based nonfiction. To confirm: should other genres be explicitly accepted or ruled out here (e.g. fiction, academic work)?
No — the assessment is a full read and a written report on structure, pacing, and content. It doesn't include line-by-line editing; that's offered separately as the Line Edit service, once the structural work is settled.
Yes — manuscripts are read in confidence and not shared or discussed with anyone else. To confirm: is this the actual policy, or do you want a more formal confidentiality/NDA statement here?
No — an enquiry with your manuscript's genre, length, and which service you're interested in is enough for a written quote. The manuscript itself is only submitted once terms are agreed and payment is complete, as PDF or Word. To confirm: any other formats you're happy to accept, or want to exclude?
If you're not satisfied with the report, a discount of up to 50% can be applied, agreed case by case depending on the nature of the concern.
John edited LNG Journal — the world's leading natural gas trade publication — for seventeen years, reporting from Gastech conferences, the Gulf States, and the industry's biggest shifts, including the years after Fukushima. He's continuing that coverage independently, writing on the energy sector for anyone who followed his work there.
Past editorial work from the LNG Journal years can be found at lngjournal.com.
Ongoing commentary on LNG, the Gulf, and the energy sector, continuing where the LNG Journal column left off.
Read on SubstackFor interview requests, review copies, or extract permissions, get in touch. Extracts are also available for serialization.