Bleeding Hearts

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank The Haemophilia Society, and especially Alan Weir, for help with details of some aspects of haemophilia. Those who require more information should write to: The Haemophilia Society, 123 Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7HR. Thanks also to David in Edinburgh, Andrew Puckett, and my wife Miranda for helping with research.

Gerald Hammond was knowledgeable as ever about firearms, and I should also thank the Estacado Gun Club for taking me along on a shoot. In fact, so many people in the USA helped with this book that it would take a sizeable supplement to list them all. So a general thank you must suffice. But special honours must go to Becky Hughes and David Martin in Seattle, Jay Schulman in Arlington, Mass., and Tresa Hughes in New York, for putting up with me, Miranda and our son Jack for so long.

The Chandler-Fulbright Award made it possible for me to spend so much time (and money) in the United States. I owe a debt to the estate of Raymond Chandler and to the staff of the Fulbright Commission in London, especially Catherine Boyle.

The real unsung heroes of this book are probably Elliott Abrams and Fawn Hall. For those who don’t know who they are, a two-part essay by Theodore Draper in the New York Review of Books serves as a good introduction, though you’ve really got to go to Draper’s book A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs or to the full Congressional Hearings to get the bigger picture. I quote from part one of the essay, published in the edition of 27 May 1993: