The Reporter’s Notebook

About the Book

Caught pants down by a dance hostress in a Laotian nightclub; hitching a ride into battle with a chain-smoking pilot in a plane filled with cans of leaking kerosene; fielding cables that arrive in the dead of night from an editor screaming for urgent copy overnight…


It’s all in a day’s work for the foreign correspondent, says author Dennis Bloodworth, who ought to know. He took it all in his stride during the more than 30 years that he spent as foreign correspondent of the London Observer.


For those who have always wondered how the news gets into the papers, here’s the story behind the stories, and even some stories that couldn’t be told.


About the Author

Dennis Bloodworth (1919–2005) was born in London in 1919 and lived in Singapore since 1956. After seeing service in World War II, he joined the London Observer in 1949, and until 1956, was successfully based in Paris and Saigon. He was chief Far East correspondent of The Observer for 25 years, covering events in Vietnam, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwán and China, until his retirement in 1981. He has also published four novels and six books about China and the Far East—two of them with his Chinese wife, Ching Ping.