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In this extract from his new book on his career as an 'Irish Times' foreign correspondent, Conor O'Cleryrecalls the thrill of opening a bureau in Moscow at a time Mikhail Gorbachev was beginning to dismantle the Soviet Union in the late 1980s

IN DECEMBER 1986, Conor Brady was appointed editor of The Irish Timesand asked me to open a staff bureau in Moscow and chronicle the changes stirring in the communist world. I didn't hesitate. I had been to the Soviet Union three times on assignment since 1979 and longed to go back. It was becoming evident that a political springtime had arrived in Russia, and we sensed the first tremors of the convulsions that were about to shake Soviet society, and in a few years bring down the Iron Curtain and end the Cold War.