Shooting History: A Personal Journey

List of Illustrations (#ulink_c72e42d2-0947-55db-b4da-b6b0ba00031c)

Prologue (#ulink_5bc5ce95-c253-57f4-9c39-be4864d7f63d)

1. Home Thoughts (#ulink_27983633-da20-50d2-88e3-32838ea36bb0)

2. Africa, Revolution and Despair (#ulink_9aacc63d-18a8-543b-a7e7-fa7b802dbb06)

3. Of Drugs and Spooks (#ulink_166cc70e-93d2-59f2-9703-23cfd0cc5ee6)

4. Tea with the Tyrant (#ulink_e3cefe1b-2de3-53f6-a30c-9c4804e41fec)

5. First Brick Out of the Wall (#litres_trial_promo)

6. Of Oil, Islam and Moscow (#litres_trial_promo)

7. Uncle Sam’s Backyard (#litres_trial_promo)

8. Potomac Fever (#litres_trial_promo)

9. Talking with the Enemy (#litres_trial_promo)

10. The Whole Lot Comes Down (#litres_trial_promo)

11. Hey, We Never Expected to Win! (#litres_trial_promo)

12. Shooting at the Messenger and Coming Full Circle (#litres_trial_promo)

Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

P.S. Insights, Interviews & More … (#litres_trial_promo)

About the author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the book (#litres_trial_promo)

Read on (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

ILLUSTRATIONS (#ulink_6f1e8991-a72c-520c-9cdb-9f16ca30c3b5)

(Photographs are from the author’s collection)

General Tom, my twice-knighted grandfather, who hung above the mantel and seemed to have inspected every boiled egg I ever ate.

War wedding. My father and mother met and married in a matter of weeks.

My father’s Hudson Terraplane Eight configured as a wartime fire-tender.

The damage caused by a Second World War bomb on the lawns of Charterhouse School; my father’s one moment of ‘action’.

A sunny Sussex childhood. Growing up in the aftermath of war.

No particular talent. Following childhood encounters with Harold Macmillan, my earliest ambition was to be a Tory MP.

My father with Macmillan at Ardingly. ‘Do you know what a Prime Minister is?’ he asked me. ‘Are you married to the Queen?’ I responded.

With Tom and Nick in the Terraplane; a happy contrast to the dining-table warfare.

The Queen visiting Ardingly. My mother had been to Harrods to buy a pair of Crown Derby cups and saucers from which the royal lips could sip their afternoon tea.

As a chorister at Winchester Cathedral in 1958.

My father, every inch a Bishop – eight feet tall in his mitre.

Back from Uganda. VSO had radicalised me, and one reason I wanted to become a journalist was in order to return there.

India in the summer of 1969, singing ‘Hey Jude’ in the Liverpool University close-part harmony Beatle band.

Pre-mobile-phone reporting for LBC in 1973, on a clunky old Motorola two-way radio.

An exchange with Ugandan dictator Idi Amin on the 1974 trip with Jim Callaghan to rescue Denis Hills.

Vietnamese boat people below decks on the refugee boat on which we found ourselves stranded in the South China Sea in 1976.

The shell of the Vietnamese refugee boat beached in Malaysia.

Interviewing the Somali President Siad Barre, a grumpy Moscow-educated ideologue running a classic Cold War Russian client state, in 1976.

With Mohinder Dhillon in Somalia. Mystified British viewers were treated to a travelogue in which an excitable white man jumped up and down talking about the threat to world peace.

Back to Uganda again in 1977, this time for ITN armed with Edward Heath’s book.

Interviewing US President Jimmy Carter and Prime Minister Jim Callaghan outside Lancaster House in London, 1977.

Preparing to conduct the first ever English-language interview with a Pope, aboard John Paul II’s plane in January 1979.

Afghanistan, 1980. With the Mujahidin in mountains above Herat in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet invasion.

Filming with Charlie Morgan at ‘Desert One’ in Iran in April 1980 amid the wreckage of Jimmy Carter’s catastrophic attempt to rescue the American hostages.

The Iran–Iraq War in 1981. Wearing no body armour and no flak jacket, I was less than well prepared to survive the conflagration in which I was caught.

With President Reagan in the White House, February 1985.