John Simpson goes much further. In Our Friends in Beijing, his second foray into fiction, the BBC’s long-serving world affairs editor reveals in public for the first time an old wound from one of the 30-plus war zones from which he has reported.His alter ego in the thriller, veteran foreign correspondent Jon Swift (‘70 per cent of what’s in the novel happened to me in one way or another’), suffers a brutal beating and a chilling mock execution.
It is based on what happened to Simpson himself in the summer of 1982 during a war in Lebanon. It has haunted this renowned broadcasting elder statesman ever since.‘It must have scarred me,’ he reflects, ‘because I have only been able to describe it until now to people close to me.’ As he talks, the.
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