Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a journalist. He confronts danger but avoids histronics. He writes and speaks with humanity, but he remains objective.

He's a BBC man having started his career 25 years ago in the radio newsroom,

before graduating to the excitement of foreign assignments.

He's told us about most of the momentous events of recent years, from Tiananmen Square to the release

of Nelson Mandela, from the fall of Chauchezcu to the collapse of the Berlin

Wall.

Most recently, he was one of the few journalists who remained in Baghdad when the allies

began their bombardment of Iraq.

He survived threats on his life, blackmail attempts and smuggled journeys into dangerous places.

In January, the Royal Television Society honored him as journalist of the year. He is John Simpson.

John it sounds an exciting, adventurous, not to say, glamorous career. Are those the

adjectives that you'd use to describe it?

I was trying to recognize my rather humdrum existence in this very exciting sort of description.

I suppose if you take the, as it were, the chapter headings and stick them together it's that but of course there's

an awful lot in between.

But patently it's a way of life for you isn't it?

It is a way of life I can't now stop it to be honest I mean I know that sounds as

though it's some form of

banned substance but I remember for instance in 1980 I was appointed the BBC's

political editor and I used to wander up and down the corridors of the House of Commons and the House of Lords

...