This blog began, as these things sometimes do, in that curious borderland between sleep and wakefulness — the 5 a.m. liminal hour when my mind so many nights decides to stage its own theatre. In this particular dream, I found myself back in either Moscow or Beijing — I couldn’t quite tell which, perhaps both … Read more …
Rather good to be back in rainy November Berlin, visiting friends now old, like us, in every sense of the word (50 years history and more), standing once again at the literal line that divided Europe and massively shaped both our lives. This place connects directly to old friends. The pastor of the original Versöhnungskirche, … Read more …
As this website has been updated, in April 2025, I’m now making accessible literally ALL the raw cassettes I recorded first as BBC World Service Central Europe Correspondent based in Vienna (1981-84), then as BBC Radio China Correspondent (1984-1987), and on to BBC World Service Diplomatic Correspondent (1988-1992) as I covered the end of the … Read more …
Click the button below to be taken to 600 hours of raw cassette recordings from Mark’s work as BBC China and then WS Diplomatic Correspondent, 1984-1992. I’ve renamed them with year and country, and given the substantial size of the archive, they’re hosted online on OneDrive rather than here on the WordPress blog. If you … Read more …
It was tremendous fun discussing with Ian Sanders of Cold War Conversations my years first as student in East Germany and the Soviet Union in 1971/72, and then covering the communist world for the next 20 years for Reuters and the BBC. Click the screenshots below for the recordings – first covering my student days … Read more …
On this page, I’ll list clickable links to a selection of serious, heavyweight, and very much less so, radio features from the first couple of years in Beijing, when I was trying to capture the normality of Chinese life. It all went down rather well with Radio Four, and especially the Today Programme, which – … Read more …
As discussed with a marvellously responsive lecture-theatre-full of Cardiff University MA students in international journalism in November 2011, I’m posting here some of my old BBC Radio News features from Beijing, recorded and broadcast between 1984 and 1987 when I was working there as BBC China correspondent. Note that several of these are in kit … Read more …
It’s quite extraordinary to think that it’s now 20 years since Chinese students and much of Beijing – then still Peking in BBC-speak – rose up and occupied Tiananmen Square to call for democracy and an end to corruption. I have a picture somewhere undiscoverable of a much younger MB standing on pretty much the … Read more …