BOOK OF THE DAY: May You Live in Interesting Times: The Journals of an Accidental Correspondent,Conor O'Clery, Poolbeg, 362pp, €19.99
IN 1982 Max Hastings preceded the British army into Port Stanley in the Falklands and "liberated" the Upland Goose pub. It made his name but other journalists called him an "insufferably pompous, bumptious egotist". In 2001 John Simpson, entering Kabul ahead of the Northern Alliance, told the camera: "It's an exhilarating feeling to be liberating a city." A few days later he said he was "very, very, very embarrassed" about his remarks.
Conor O'Clery's "liberation" moment came in 1999, during the withdrawal of Indonesian troops from East Timor. He and two colleagues preceded UN troops into the capital, Dili, and made their way to the Turismo Hotel, which they found "stinking of excrement and [partially] burned out". Requisitioning rooms, they joked that they were "liberating" the Turismo.
The temptation for foreign correspondents to liberate cities, pubs, hotels - and any available buildings - is obviously great. It's typical of O'Clery that he turned this temptation into a joke. Throughout this book he successfully evades the three pitfalls of the foreign correspondent: boasting, breast-beating and hectoring. He tells the stories, leaving us to infer the obvious: that it requires courage to cover atrocities, that witnessing them pained him, and that he dislikes the regimes that inflict them.
Successful reportage, like successful gambling, depends on luck. O'Clery was in Moscow for the dismantling of communism; in Washington to help Annie Murphy spill the beans on Bishop Casey; in Beijing to witness China's meteoric rise; in New York for 9/11, where with typical serendipity his apartment was across Battery Park from the Twin Towers. From 9/11 he moves back to Afghanistan in 1980, where the CIA was arming mujahideen against the Russians, thus laying the ground for the future attack.
His best reports are when he hinges great events on small incidents. Recounting anti-apartheid riots in South Africa in 1985, he focuses on rioters, unchecked by police, tearing through the Gandhi settlement where the Mahatma lived until 1911. "It was utterly destroyed . . . Gandhi's handloom and cloth had disappeared, as had the iconic wire-rimmed spectacles. The house where Gandhi evolved his philosophy of passive resistance had not been burned, but the roof had collapsed and the white-washed walls had been kicked in. A swarm of bees had settled on the debris inside, making it impossible to enter." This, in its laconic way, is poignant and pointed, the desecration of a tomb. But he provides the happy coda: the reopening of the Ghandi Settlement in 2000.
O'Clery is excellent on the mechanics of the profession, on how reporters receive tips, fact-check, evade military minders, arrange lifts and get stories out. In Kabul in 1980 the telephone lines went dead; reporters plied the telex operator with drink until the telex was cut, leaving only "pigeons - outward-bound travellers - at the airport, who would take typed copy to news agencies abroad to 'onsend' to our newspapers. Before mobile and satellite phones and e-mails, a reporter was only as good as his or her ability to transmit a story."
O'Clery comes across as wry, compassionate - and a touch disingenuous. This is signalled in the title - he's not an "accidental" correspondent, but a career one. Similarly he knows how to stir things up - he advised publishing a letter which got an American diplomat recalled from Dublin - but always acts surprised at the consequences. In Washington he learned that the visa ban on Gerry Adams was about to be lifted and - since it was too late for The Irish Times to lead - passed the scoop to a Reuters friend, who went public before the British ambassador had been informed. "Inadvertently," O'Clery writes demurely, "I had worsened the rift between Washington and London." If journalists don't actually liberate cities, they are sometimes on the other side of news and certainly can cause ripples.
• Bridget Hourican is a freelance journalist and historian