LIKE the Sunday Times under Andrew Neil's editorship, this account of his years at the paper (1983-94) is magnetic in the full, bipolar sense of the word: it both attracts and repels. It is attention-grabbing, racy, pacy, tendentious and overblown. It is suffused with his egotistical, driven, yet oddly engaging personality. And, again like his Sunday Times, it does not always deliver what it promises.

Take the first sentence of Chapter One: "I had been editor for five hours before I received my first death threat." Great intro, eh? But read on, and you discover that the "death threat" amounted to no more than a bit of hard-man bar talk from the boyfriend of a woman journalist who believed Neil was treating her unfairly. Neil names the man who threatened him; I remember him well, and he was not a scary guy.

I should declare an interest. I worked for the Sunday Times under Harold Evans. I was saddened by its fall in standards after the takeover by Rupert Murdoch in 1981 (epitomised by the shameful fiasco of the "Hitler Diaries") and decided to leave just after the arrival of Neil, Murdoch's chosen instrument for the transformation of the paper.

So I am not disposed to like what he made of the Sunday Times. I must say, however, that on the two occasions I met Neil in person (admittedly in the non-confrontational context of my decision to quit) I found him friendly and straightforward.

In print, Neil's buttonholing style is often tiresome, as is his constant eagerness to justify his attitudes and actions (and, it often seems, himself as befits a Scots Calvinist), to settle old scores (most of which must mean little to the general reader), and to preach his gospel of meritocracy, social mobility and the market economy.

In short, the laddie doth protest too much. But some parts of his book are undeniably gripping, notably his account of Times Newspapers defeat of the print unions by the clandestine flit to Wapping, and his revealing portrait of "the Sun King", as he calls Murdoch, arguably the dominant figure of our age.

Take, for example, this image of Murdoch fuming in the Wapping bunker as his underlings struggled frantically to produce the first edition of the Sunday Times to be published by the contentious new technology: "The more we slipped behind deadline, the more Rupert raged. Instead of encouraging people with words of support he allowed his fear of failure to overwhelm him.

"In one memorable confrontation he turned on James Adams (a notably loyal Neil/ Murdoch man) and began stabbing him repeatedly in the chest with his finger. `You f... !' he shouted. `You bastard! Get this f...... newspaper out!' This was no way to treat somebody who had been working non-stop for forty-eight hours for the cause.

Neil tells us, in a rare moment of understatement, that Murdoch is "much more right-wing than is generally thought". In the 1988 US presidential election he favoured Pat Robertson, "the far right religious fanatic who claims to speak in tongues, has direct access to God, takes credit for having convinced the Lord for sparing America from Hurricane Gloria and believes in a `Jewish money conspiracy'. `You can say what you like,' Rupert said to me ... He's right on all the issues'."

Thus Neil dismisses the notion that Murdoch is a sophisticated thinker who allows his tabloids toe peddle crude simplicities for the sake of circulation: "If you want to know what Rupert Murdoch really thinks then read the Sun.

[it] reflects what Rupert thinks on every major issue."

In his chapter on the Wapping watershed, which has a thriller like fascination, Neil catalogues and rightly condemns the sabotage and venality of the Fleet Street print unions.

But he fails to say that in the 1970s Murdoch had encouraged the unions' bad old ways by agreeing all too easily to their demands at the Sun and News of the World, thus undermining attempts to reform and modernise Fleet Street, notably by the Thomson management at Times Newspapers.

This was the reason for the unions' eagerness to get into bed with Murdoch when Thomson finally gave up and put the papers up for sale: they thought they could "do business" with him. Neil simply remarks, without explanation: "The unions, ironically, saw him as the best guarantee of things continuing largely as they had." How wrong they were.

It is striking, too, that for all his justifiable outrage at the unions' behaviour, he expresses no moral qualms about the Wapping plan, which entailed an elaborate series of bogus negotiations about the launch of a fictitious newspaper called the London Post. Ends justify means, it seems - depending on which side you're on.