By CHRIS REDMAN /EDITOR, TIME ATLANTIC

n the 18 months that TIME's Atlantic edition has been based in London, nobody has done more to ensure the success of our decentralized operation than Brigid O'Hara-Forster, whose name appears on our masthead this week under her new title of associate editor. The title is in recognition of the consummate skills O'Hara-Forster brought with her when she came here from 18 years as a senior reporter at the magazine's New York headquarters. Besides her eye for detail, grace under pressure and an unflagging dedication to accuracy, Brigid is also an invaluable adviser whose breadth of knowledge and fine news judgement ensure that this edition of TIME upholds the proud traditions of the world's number one newsmagazine.

The London posting has been a homecoming for O'Hara-Forster who, as the daughter of an English actress, grew up largely in theater dressing rooms around Britain doing her homework to the sound of loudspeakers relaying plays on stage. The experience led her into a brief acting career that, she says, consisted largely of playing French maids and murder victims and "revealed that talent was not necessarily genetic." Abandoning the stage, she traveled to America where the theater's loss became journalism's gain. She joined the staff of TIME and became intrigued by the fact that Russia not only was the source of the Chekhov plays she knew so well, but also had a complex history and disturbing politics. She soon evolved into a key researcher for the magazine's coverage of the Soviet Union, overseeing stories and special issues on topics ranging from strategic arms control to the collapse of communism in 1991. "One of the real privileges of my job was to have been so deeply involved in covering the changes wrought by Mikhail Gorbachev," she says. That coverage culminated in 1990 when he was named TIME's Man of the Decade. She has maintained this area of expertise in London, where she takes on the most demanding stories on the continuing saga of Russia's post-communist transition. But her interests, happily for us, run the range of those of our readers, from the Middle East peace process to Prime Minister Tony Blair's Britain.

"Having spent the first part of my life in Britain and the latter half in the U.S., I feel totally at home in both countries and both cultures," O'Hara-Forster says. Perhaps because she has come full circle: one of her recent projects was reporting on a historic production at London's National Theatre of--what else?--Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov's 1928 play, Flight.