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John Osman
The great John Osman” was the description employed about the author of this book by BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson During his career, he pulled off numerous scoops, recalled...view moreThe great John Osman” was the description employed about the author of this book by BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson During his career, he pulled off numerous scoops, recalled for what the news itself was: not news as a way of polishing a television, radio, Internet, or journalistic image. Osman belonged to a generation of journalists who, broadly speaking, thought that a reporter’s self-effacement, so far as possible, was the best way of seeking truth.
Osman has travelled in one hundred countries over sixty years, and he held several of the world’s top journalistic jobs as a foreign correspondent. He thinks he remains to this day the only BBC staffer to have been, for some years in each post, BBC Washington correspondent, BBC Moscow correspondent, and BBC Buckingham Palace correspondent – a rare combination of major assignments. In addition to those posts, he served BBC Radio and TV News and the World Service during a quarter of a century or so in roles as varied as BBC Commonwealth and colonial affairs correspondent, United Nations correspondent, Africa correspondent, and diplomatic correspondent. Earlier, for nearly ten years, he worked for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph as their special correspondent in the Middle East and Cyprus, Africa, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sikkim, his assignments including the flight from Tibet in 1959 of the Dalai Lama. One of his dispatches appeared in the first columns of the Sunday Telegraph upon its initial publication in February 1961.
Osman and his wife, Virginia.. have been wed for forty-four years. Osman is now eighty-five and has ideas for producing three other very different kinds of books to this one before he reaches one hundred or dies. He skied until he was eighty-three; still goes mountain walking (the pair were members of the French Alpine Club for thirty years); and (camping most of the time) they drive their small Romahome camping-car all over the place – including, in recent years, through twenty countries in West Europe, East Europe, and the Balkans, as far as Capadoccia in Asian Turkey.view less