Autobiography: Back in the explosive 1970s, any BBC bulletin leading with the words: "In Northern Ireland tonight . . . " produced an immediate 20 per cent drop in British viewers. Two decades later, a similar effect was observed about coverage of the Balkans. The audience at home grew tired of it, writes Kate Adie, "not out of inhumanity, but from a combination of irritation, despair and distance".
Though both conflicts moulder on, inducing the same old weariness, it is to Adie's credit that her take on them is relevant, insightful and action-packed enough to remain topical and readable for, oh, another century or so.
Her forays into the North reach all the way from a hilariously drunken RUC dinner dance in the presence of an earnest Secretary of State and his well-bred Home Counties wife, to seeing one cameraman's face raked by a nun's nails in a Monaghan hospital for inquiring about a wounded (in fact, dead) Provo, and another slugged by a priest at a hunger striker's funeral.
She observes the unique rage of Belfast rioters - "the only time I've ever seen men frothing at the mouth with fury" - as well as their poor physical condition:
"There were times when there seemed to be a wilful presentation of poverty: 'Youse think we're shite,' they'd yell, 'youse think we look like shite as well, don'tcher? Well, we don't care.'"
As the arguments swirled about whether Bobby Sands had been ill-treated, she masqueraded as a mourner in order to judge for herself: "In his coffin, Mr Sands did not present a pale face of suffered humanity. He looked like a banana. Luminous yellow. I sniffed and coughed and looked hard. This was not the time and place to comment on the effects of hepatitis A and liver failure."
A common notion that she loses her critical faculties when confronted with the British army is dented by an account of a West Belfast house raid, where a soldier used his rifle butt "to sweep every trinket and knick-knack off a mantlepiece, crunching cheap china under his boots. He saw me [looking through a window], gave me a sullen look, and smashed the remaining ornaments on a couple of shelves before appearing at the front door and saying: 'They're dirty buggers in there, my mum would puke if she saw how this lot live' . . . I couldn't bear to see the women return, and went up the road to join my crew filming the start of stone-throwing. It's incidents like these which stay with me, not the panoramic sweep of violence".
And it's incidents like these that give her accounts of reporting from war zones and dodgy dots on the map, from Tiananmen Square and the Gulf to the Balkans, the ring of authenticity. These are neither the chest-thumping accounts of the war junkie nor of the big-haired, chauffeur-driven network reporter with "an alligator's worth of teeth" who assumes front row status at press conferences as a birthright.
The BBC drove their own armoured cars, with Adie at the wheel, her toothbrush, bottle of Scotch, torch and tiny make-up bag always close. Without resorting to polemic or sentimentality (she'd eat her own liver first), she conveys plainly the clammy fear, the messiness, the casual barbarism and futility of war. And fading images are resurrected, such as the bungling old liars of Beijing, who "had held on to their antimacassared armchairs of power through simple brutality".
As for journalistic mystique, Adie - who never expected to be a reporter - gives it a battering on every other page: "Most assignments are a combination of panic, improvisation and hard slog . . . The first remark you'll hear from anyone at the scene of the crime, the bombed village or the earthquake is: 'You should have been here yesterday . . .'"
While the book tells us much about Kate Adie, professional reporter, and what drives her, it stops resolutely short of spilling the beans on Kate Adie, private person.
We learn of a charmed Sunderland childhood as the adopted daughter of comfortably off, conformist, middle-class Wilfrid and Maud. Boyfriends get a rare mention only in the early stages and only by first name. Later, in a single paragraph, we discover that she had been reunited with her birth mother "and a wonderful, welcoming tribe of fascinating relatives". That's it.
Professionally becalmed now in a BBC backwater (another kind of war, articulated as a general assault on the Birtist regime's "embarrassing itch for the world of money- making"), she may comment as she pleases. Her loathing of the "autocratic and primitive" Saudi regime is palpable, as is a lashing contempt for the US military.
A morning spent with several thousand GIs based in Saudi at the onset of the Gulf War - "10 per cent women, over 30 per cent black and 100 per cent dim" - elicited the information that they hadn't a clue where they were, still less why. By contrast, she asked a bunch of British tank soldiers why they were here. "Oil," they replied, deeply unimpressed. "Fancy you not knowing that."
Her theory is that Americans lost interest in the outside world after the fall of the Berlin Wall. "The less we fear that foreigners are going to kill us, the less we're interested in them," remarked the veteran ex-head of the AFP agency, Claude Moisy. So non- American stories became a rarity on the US's nightly bulletins and continued in that vein for over a decade. Until September 11th, 2001. They had not been interested in foreigners, writes Adie, because they had not feared them.
For this insight alone, not to mention a good, pacey read, The Kindness of Strangers is worth the price.
Kathy Sheridan is an Irish Times journalist
The Kindness of Strangers: the Autobiography. By Kate Adie.
Headline, 373pp. £20