One of John Simpson’s more memorable keepsakes was a second-hand fountain pen given to him during the Romanian revolution in 1989. It was a fat, flashy number, far too bling for a BBC man, but was still somewhat special: its previous owner was Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s very-soon-to-be-late dictator.
John Simpson: My torture was deeply humiliating, wounding to the spirit irishtimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from irishtimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The veteran correspondent on wanderlust, surviving ageism – and the brush with death that still haunts him today
10 July 2021 • 5:00am I miss a bit of excitement’: John Simpson photographed at home in Oxford, June 2021
Credit: Ben Quinton
All novelists draw on their own experiences to some extent in their writing, but John Simpson goes much further. In Our Friends in Beijing, his second foray into fiction, the BBC’s long-serving world affairs editor reveals in public for the first time an old wound from one of the 30-plus war zones from which he has reported.
His alter ego in the thriller, veteran foreign correspondent Jon Swift (‘70 per cent of what’s in the novel happened to me in one way or another’), suffers a brutal beating and a chilling mock execution. It is based on what happened to Simpson himself in the summer of 1982 during a war in Lebanon. It has haunted this renowned broadcasting elder statesman ever since.