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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor to the Spectator.

This week I'm very pleased to be joined by Lindsay Hilton, who is the international editor of Channel 4 News

and the author of a fascinating new book called I Brought the War with Me, Stories and Poems from the Front Line.

And it's a curious mixture of memoir and anthology.

And Lindsay, one of your colleagues at your publisher told me, this was the

closest we'd get to an autobiography from you. Can I ask what made you want to do this book in this

way? It really started at the beginning of the war in Ukraine. I was in Kramatosk, in the east of Ukraine, waiting for the war. And I've

always carried a book of poetry with me when I've been traveling and when I've been covering

conflicts because it helps me, it just helps you make sense of things. And sometimes poets can say

things in a way that has has meaning and

depth that I can't as a journalist. And when the war started, I think, I just, I felt bewildered.

I just couldn't believe that I was witnessing a war in Europe in this way. And I started to tweet

out a poem a day, because I was reading a lot of poetry to help myself make sense of way. And I started to tweet out a poem a day because I was reading a lot of poetry

to help myself make sense of it. And then people started to respond and I realized that a lot of

other people were feeling exactly the same. They couldn't believe what we were seeing.

And so after a while, I ran out of poems that I knew. And so then I started to research more poems to tweet out because I was getting a good response and people were interested. And then I realized there are so many war poems and poets out there that I knew nothing about. You know, Gaza, Syrian and Ukrainian.

Ukrainians revere their poets.

And so this idea of twinning stories of my own experience of conflict with poetry,

...