Edward Lucas is International Editor of the Economist. He has been covering Central and Eastern Europe for more than 20 years, witnessing the final years of the last Cold War, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet empire, Boris Yeltsin’s downfall and Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.

From 1992 to 1994, he was managing editor of The Baltic Independent, a weekly newspaper published in Tallinn. He holds a BSc from the London School of Economics, and studied Polish at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow. He is married to Cristina Odone with three children. The New Cold War (2008) was his first book; his latest book Deception, about east-west espionage, was published in March 2012.