Saturday morning saw an early crowd turn up at LSE for ‘War Stories: How to bring the battle to the book’, where I shared a platform with Andrew Mueller, an Australian, UK-residing PJ O’Rourke for our times (imagine a country & western version of PJO with less fear & loathing), and the Sunday Times’ Stephen Grey, who recently wrote a moving tribute to my former Mirror colleague Ruper Hamer on his blog…
the event was organised by POLIS, a new journalism and society thinktank, their report is here…
all three of us had written about our different wars in different ways, mine through fiction (journalism originally, but somehow needing a fictional narrative to say everything journalism left unsaid), Andrew through writing an often funny travelogue that tells you exactly what it was like to be in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam and other places not for the faint-hearted, and Stephen through investigation and analysis, working backwards from the point of conflict to uncover what was actually going on…