On the two-mile walk home from his small private school in London in the early 1950s, the eight-year-old John Simpson had to wear the school's regulation bright purple blazer and cap and purple and silver tie through the gloomy working class streets of Norwood.
Norwood contained great swathes of ugly suburban grey brick two-up two-down houses. They had been built in the late 1840s by Simpson's great great grandfather and his great grandfather. Now as young John, his relative poshness proclaimed loudly from his school uniform, walked past these houses, rough kids would come out and mock, pelt stones and generally harass him daily. While inventing various ruses to get through the area safely, John was also staring nosily in the windows of the houses as he passed, reconstructing the lives of those who lived within from the items he could see inside. "The walk built up my imagination," he writes. He made up stories about how the streets got their names, observed the natural rhythms of leaves and water and in thick fogs imagined himself as all varieties of boy adventurer.
He suggests this is part of a pattern. "The one thing that seems to link lots of journalists who do that sort of job is being a kind of outsider, who looks in the windows to see what is happening inside the room," he says.
The eight-year-old Simpson had already endured the trauma of his parents' marriage break-up. He describes the final moment of the break-up - a scene on a doorstep in which the young boy says he should stay with his father - in a shockingly detached way although it is clear it had a deep effect. "I watched her, a tall, elegant figure in dark green moving down the street, her head bowed, the suitcase in her hand." For the remaining 30 years of his mother's life he says neither he nor she could deal with the degree of guilt generated by the event.
The childhood trauma, unusual upbringing, complex relationships, regular danger and bout of emotional exhaustion are all rich subjects for exploration in the search for what motivates him, what makes him survive and want to survive for so long at the top of the fiercely competitive area of foreign television reporting. Such adult drive is often associated with unhappy childhood relationships, but having laid out the facts in the book he dismisses them as being of little relevance to explaining him. The explanation is quite simple, he asserts: "I like finding out stories and telling them to other people."
However, you can find out stories and tell them to other people without going to stand in the middle of revolutions and civil wars for much of your life. John Simpson agrees ("I don't want to be regarded ever as sort of journalistic snob") but says that the foreign stories are usually better ones.
"There is an exotic nature to foreign stories which is quite fun. You are freer - when I began as a foreign correspondent I felt tremendously free and liberated really from all the restraints of narrow domestic broadcasting." While this is less a factor in the Information Age he says that in the past there was the great liberation of knowing that the people you were reporting on abroad were highly unlikely to hear what you said about them on the BBC. "Of course now they know what you have been saying within an hour."
He agrees that there is something unusual about the type of journalist who spends a lot of their life in the world's war hotels: the Holiday Inn Sarajevo, the Grand Hotel Pristina, the Al Rashid Hotel in Bagdhad and Beirut's Hotel Commodore.
"They are chancers in the sense that they take chances. That is the kind of correspondent I became. You get also get poseurs, people that are there because they fancy themselves, the kind of people that are there for the wrong reasons, the `look at me factor'. The ones who wear a flak jacket on camera when it isn't even remotely required. That is done to say `look at me, this really dangerous and I'm great'."
Many of these people are loners, and some may have psychological dependence on drink or other things. While there is a higher proportion than average with drink problems he says: "A lot of journalism is done by hanging around and a lot of hanging around is done in bars and what bars exist to do is sell alcohol." He is not a great drinker himself, he says. He has a half bottle of wine a day and the odd whiskey (he says this in the book as well). He mentioned his weight twice during the interview and several times in the book.
If you had a dependence on thrills, vicarious emotional intensity and fame then John Simpson's would be the job for you. In 1989 he was in Tiananmen Square for the massacre. Within months he watched the holes being made in the Berlin Wall, hands clasping each other from east to west. He saw Alexander Dubcek with red and watery eyes shepherded onto a balcony by Vaclav Havel as the old cry from the Prague Spring "Svoboda! Svoboda!" ("Freedom! Freedom!) echoed around Wenceslas Square. He was in Bucharest on Christmas Day 1989 when the Ceauseascus were shot dead. The following year he was in South Africa for the release of Nelson Mandela, in Baghdad for the Gulf War.
He agrees that there is a selfish element to his love of his job. Journalism allows him to be there, to see and experience dramatic events himself rather than watching them on television. But there has been a price for such regular exposure to intense emotion - what he calls "making a living out of people whose lives change in an instant". Having experienced "so much joy and horror and fear and excitement in a 12-month period" he suffered a bout of emotional and physical exhaustion.
He says he cannot feel detached from the events he is witnessing as some journalists claim they do. "That would be to be a tourist, and I would really feel very bad if I thought that was my purpose or my method - the tourism of pain." He says he remembers being in Rwanda "staggering from one appalling thing to another absolutely horrified trying to understand it. I don't think it's a very becoming thing to say one can do these things and not be affected by them." His therapy, he says, it to write about the horrible and moving things. "Funnily enough it doesn't work with broadcasting which may say something about the nature of it."
Television reporters are used to criticism from others that their medium and indeed their work is often superficial, overly simplistic and distorting of reality. However, John Simpson is keen to make a case in defence of television war reporting as well. He says television has changed the nature of warfare. Armies from states "at the upper end of the market" which in military terms means NATO states, can no longer kill civilians and get away with it.
Victims of warfare are on television almost as soon as they have been targeted, he says. As a result, public revulsion at the effects of warfare is so great that armies now have to be more careful than ever over who they kill. "War reporting is now essentially victim reporting. It is very difficult in places like Bosnia to see any actual action apart from shells landing. To be with the thugs as they burned and raped and looted their way through their ethnic cleansing landscape was just impossible usually.
"So in television terms what you have left to concentrate on is anything that is to hand - which is the victim, of whom there was no shortage in Sarajevo for example. A newspaper writer could write about the strategic situation and what was really happening on a wider stage. Each time I went out there I used to say: this time we are not going to mess around with the local day-to-day stuff; I'm going to do the overview piece. "Then you get there and 10 old ladies have been smashed into pulp at a water tap or something and you can't ignore it. The result of that has for the first time redressed that dreadful 20th-century situation where armies regard civilians as their natural victims." Now everybody at home sees the victims and they don't like it. "Not only can the Americans not afford to lose a single American soldier because that gets on television and gives a bad impression, but also they can't afford to kill too many civilians - they can't afford to kill any nowadays." Indeed even when they kill enemy soldiers, the corpses appear on television. In Iraq, he says, President Bush had to end an offensive against the Iraqi army at the end of the war because people didn't like seeing dead Iraqi troops on television.
"I'm not always terribly proud of television but I do feel it has done something in this regard. If Winston Churchill had stood up in the House of Commons in 1943 and said our bombers will only attack military targets, will avoid civilian targets wherever possible and apologised for civilian casualties he would have been hounded out of office by the British public. They wanted German civilians to die just as they were being killed. But we are getting to the stage now where almost nobody dies." This isn't a defence of television, he says, more a "halting justification".
The limits of journalism and television in particular were certainly exposed by Bosnia, he says. Despite enormous coverage, most viewers and readers could not explain what the war was about. In the book he tells the story of how one US media organisation, frustrated by the complexity of the story, instructed its reporter simply to drop the Croats from the story altogether to make it more comprehensible.
"You can understand it: of course it's a ludicrous reaction, it's a Hollywood reaction, but at least they wanted to explain it. The three-sided civil war was defeating for the media. As I was waffling my way through all the names and the places and the sides, I used to feel that nobody is going to understand this. I often doubted that I quite understood it myself. It's only afterwards I think often that you do understand these things properly.
"I feel mildly defensive because everyone says television is the great simplifier and in many ways it is," but people can't expect to understand the complexities of Bosnia through watching television news broadcasts alone. "The only way of understanding it properly is studying the background properly and going through the longer newspaper articles and watching the longer television programmes."
He believes too that many reporters lost their sense of objectivity and balance in coverage of the Bosnian war. Indeed he himself got into trouble with his bosses after saying that the NATO bombing of Serbian positions around Sarajevo made him feel good.
The loss of objectivity was a natural human response. When you were in the Holiday Inn and walking around the streets of Sarajevo as the journalists were, you saw the war from the point of view of the people around you who were being shot at. It looked very simple from the streets of Sarajevo: there were people killing and people being killed.
"It was the journalists' response to the complexity of the war," says Simpson, "because they too had to feel there had to be someone to root for. I feel that whole band of people who reported it, sometimes very honourably, they had to have a side. Because if you don't, if you just walked through there saying I'm not for any of you people and I have higher ideas, it's actually quite difficult to last there."
In the book he is dismissive of many of the reporters who stayed in Sarajevo to report on the siege, describing them as "mostly young and adventurous tyros who had come here early on because it was dangerous, and had been offered jobs by famous organisations who couldn't get anyone else to go there." Now, he says, "looking back I think I was a bit harsh about what I said about my fellow journalists there. It's a natural human reaction that you want to respond to this kind of awfulness by taking sides."
He also carefully disputes the regular claims that Bosnia was a present-day Holocaust, that Omarska and Trnopolje were 1990 versions of Auschwitz. "If we are talking numbers then obviously it was not [on a par with the Holocaust]. I think there was a difference in kind which makes the Auschwitz analogy unhelpful. Auschwitz was the product of one of the world's most highly industrialised nations which turned its industrial skills to massacring people. Serbia is not; it's essentially a war of warlords and gangsters and bandits. As throughout history, warlords and bandits treat their victims appallingly, sometimes in individual cases no doubt worse than anybody was treated in Auschwitz.
"There are things that you really want to put out of your mind about what happened to people, and some of the evidence in the Hague trials are things you don't want to dwell on. I don't suppose people did that in Auschwitz; I don't suppose the SAS for all their evil did these things.
"So I'm not saying it doesn't count on the scale of human suffering. What I'm saying is if we regard it as being our modern Holocaust we are misunderstanding the nature of the Holocaust and we are misunderstanding the nature of what happened in former Yugoslavia."
Brought up by his father, John Simpson was also influenced by Brian Brooks, initially a lodger who became a friend and mentor. He went to Cambridge to study English and while there he became editor of the literary publication Granta. During a visit to Boston in 1963 at age 19, he had met Diane, a Californian whom he married two years later while a student at Cambridge. The following year, 1966, he applied for and got a job as a sub-editor with the BBC. After two years of drudge he became a radio producer, then a regional producer/reporter and then a BBC national reporter. In 1971 he was give the new post of Dublin Correspondent.
"From the first day I arrived in Dublin I have felt good about it," he says. "When I lived here I always wanted to come back and live here. Life is lived here as it ought to be. There is a kind of gentleness you don't get in other places."
Now he does live here by the sea near Dalkey village. A seal swims in front of his home from time to time. He and his wife often spend days doing almost nothing. It is a retreat and a lifestyle made possible by technology and the fact that he is no longer an administrator. It is as easy to do what he does from an Irish base than from anywhere else, he says.
His second wife, Dee Kruger, a television producer, travels on most foreign assignments with him and has just completed a television editing course. "It keeps me happy, it keeps us happy, and it keeps us married." In 1984, 21 years after meeting Diane in Boston and 19 years after marrying her he left and moved in with an American television producer, Tira Shubart. Ten years later he met Dee Kruger in South Africa. He married her in 1996.
He says he sacrificed previous relationships to his job but then adds: "That sounds a very self-aggrandising way of saying I did a lot of things I shouldn't have done when I was travelling. People say `it's the job' as if you don't have any free will at all and it is forced on you. But it is a difficult life."
How long will he keep going as a foreign reporter? "I equate not travelling and not reporting not just with early retirement but with death," he says quickly and definitively. "I report and travel, therefore I am. If something happened to prevent me I would be a very gloomy person indeed. I'm just going to see how long it lasts. My very old friend Martha Gellhorn died last year aged 89. She wrote her last article and did her last travelling at the age of 88 when she went to cover the street children of Brazil and got mugged. If health lasts and people are prepared to publish my stuff then I'll carry on into triple figures, or not, whichever may be the soonest."
