Alan Philps joined Reuters as a trainee in 1978, and worked in Moscow 1979-80, returning in 1985 at the start of the Gorbachev era. He was expelled from Russia in September of the same year in retaliation for Margaret Thatcher’s expulsion from London of 25 alleged Soviet spies. 

After joining the the foreign staff of the Daily Telegraph, he returned to Russia as Moscow correspondent 1994-98, then moved to Jerusalem as Middle East correspondent to cover the Second Intifada, the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the US invasion of Iraq. He returned to London to be the Telegraph’s foreign editor in 2003. 

In 2006 he helped to start The National, an English language newspaper in Abu Dhabi, and in 2011 he was hired by Chatham House to re-launch its bi-monthly magazine, The World Today.

He has written two books on Russian themes: The Boy from Baby House 10, about abandoned children and international adoption, and The Red Hotel, published in April 2023 which tells the story of Stalin’s wartime propaganda campaign though the experience of journalists and translators who lived and worked in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. 

On Substack: alanphilps.substack.com