The Reporter's Notebook

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.