Paul Vallely was covering the 1984?85 famine in Ethiopia for The Times when he and Bob Geldof first met. Inspired by his on the ground reporting, Geldof asked him to travel across Africa with him in 1985 to decide how to spend the £140 million raised by Live Aid. He co-wrote Bob's bestselling autobiography Is That It and wrote a number of publications on Live Aid and Live 8 for the Band Aid Trust. In 1990, he wrote a pioneering study Bad Samaritans: First World Ethics and Third World Debt, which set Geldof and Bono on the charity-to-justice journey from Live Aid to Live 8. He also worked as Geldof's adviser on the Commission for Africa, which laid the groundwork for the Gleneagles G8to lobby world leaders to double aid to Africa and cancel its debts. He wrote the Penguin edition of the Commission for Africa report and was co-author of its full report, Our Common Interest. He was chair of two international development agencies, Traidcraft and the Catholic Institute for International Relations and is a senior research fellow at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester.