From the con flict-stricken waters of his wartime service in the Merchant Navy to the restless corridors of power in Whitehall and the tumult of the Yeltsin years in Russia, Sir Ronald McIntosh has never been far from the centre of events. As Director General of the National Economic Development Of fice in the 1970s, he was intimately concerned with the industrial disputes and in flationary pressures that brought the British economy to the verge of collapse, and his memoirs give a compelling account of those days. Ronnie was born in 1919 and his working life continued until he was almost eighty. His career in public service, and later in the City of London and in post-Communist Russia, spanned a turbulent period of twentieth-century history that has few parallels in the past. As well as containing engrossing portraits of some of the most signi fcant figures of the era, Turbulent Times paints a more personal picture, that of the awakening of lifelong ideals, a long and happy marriage and a developing interest in Catholicism.A man of great humanity and commitment to social justice, the memoirs of Ronnie McIntosh are an invaluable addition to our understanding of the events that shaped the world in which we now live.