Live tonight – Peter Beaumont on war reporting

Peter Beaumont drops by the Frontline Club tonight to discuss his latest book – The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict – and his life spent reporting from the frontlines of many wars. The Observer Foreign Affairs Editor has had a change of heart of late, see below, and it will be interesting to hear his thoughts on his profession, the risks involved and exactly how and why this change happened. We start at 7pm GMT/11am PST Tues, 12 May. If you can’t join us at the Club, please join us online on the Frontline Club live channel of Events page,

It is not always the big things. Last September, on the eve of an ordinary assignment, I woke up and realised I never wanted to see an airport again. I didn’t want the smell or the sight of them. The grey, boring moments spent waiting in departures lounges I felt had eaten up my life. I didn’t make it to Heathrow.

It was a crisis that had been building for over a year. In my last year reporting from Iraq, something had happened. Rather than seeking the most meaningful stories, I had slipped into chasing the most dangerous ones. And in the process I had become someone I didn’t want to be. Not someone who wrote about the consequences of war, but someone who had become part of its logic. link