In 1998, an eccentric British ex-army officer called Mark Kitto set up an illegal English-language magazine in China. Despite strict media censorship, he kept going though thick and thin, encouraged by a readership that came to refer to the publication as Shanghai's Time Out or sometimes simply "The Bible". In 2004, for the first time, it looked like Mark was about to receive official acceptance. On the verge of stability, after so many years of struggle, the magazine, now called That's Shanghai, was wrestled from him by his business partners. The Last Word tells the story of one man and his fight to start a media empire under the nose of the world's most powerful authoritarian regime.