Miller was born in London on 28 November 1932 to a Royal Air Force intelligence officer turned Financial Times staffer.

He went to the Enfield Grammar School before two years of National Service in the Army, commencing in 1951, when he learned Russian and became a language clerk at MI10, responsible for intelligence on Soviet military hardware, in Whitehall.

There his wife gave birth to the first set of British twins born in the USSR since the revolution and the family lived in a block of flats on Sadovo Samotechnaya, an enclave for foreigners.

He went to the Soviet Union at the height of the East-West Cold War and some of the most prominent stories of the 20th century such as the Great Spy Game, the U-2 drama, the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred while he was reporting there.

The book contains details of everyday life in the Soviet Union such as shortages, dealing with the KGB as well as with bedbugs and cockroaches, censorship, living in a Moscow flat with a rabbit called Floppy, drunkenness, dissidents and death.

[2] In July 2010, Miller's daughter Jane was awarded an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition of her work on control and elimination of malaria in Tanzania for some 15 years.