If you have a child, I said, you have a responsibility at least to stay alive.

I was planning, I told everybody, to take him on the road with me. At the very least I fully expected to keep up my hectic pace, and my passion as a war correspondent.

In Bosnia, little children shot in the head by a guy who thinks it's okay to aim his gun at a child.

Indeed in the full flush of journalistic passion and conviction I once told an interviewer that of course I would never get married. And I most definitely would never have children.

In Iran the whole reform and democracy movement has been based on the emerging free press.

Sadly, marriage and motherhood have coincided with the demise of journalism as I knew it and I dreamt that it would always be.