The definition of reportage per se could be argued over indefinitely, but perhaps it could be best described as bearing eye witness accurately. John Carey's anthology begins in 430BC with the description by Thucydides of the plague in Athens - possibly typhus, though it has not been identified - while the city was crowded with fugitives from the Peloponnesian War. Xenophon is raided for some pages from his Anabasis, Pliny the Younger describes the eruption of Vesuvius which destroyed Pompeii, Priscus gives his version of dining with the terrible Hun, Attila. As in almost all of these Faber anthologies, the pieces - usually extracts are many and small, and predictably there is a great deal about war, executions, persecution, criminality, etc. George Gascoigne's famous account of the sack of Antwerp by Alva's rebellious army is given at some length, and on the other side of the fence, the arrest of the Jesuit Edmund Campion in England in 181 and the torture of another Jesuit, John Gerard, in the Tower 16 years later (Gerard survived, and escaped). Sir Thomas Roe records his treatment at the court of the "Great Mogul", the Emperor Jehangir, and Cromwell at his most biblical triumphal writes to his brother in law after the victory of Marston Moor. There are lighter moments, of course, such as Boswell's account of Dr Johnson's ponderous playfulness, Garrick in the role of Hamlet, Coleridge visiting the Lake District, Flaubeit writing about the dancing girls of Esna on his Egyptian journey. In more recent years, the Vietnam War figures heavily. It is needless to say that the book, of its nature, has no continuity and is chiefly for reading in snippets.