A fascinating account of the history of Frontline Television News agency which was founded by freelance news cameramen during the Romanian Revolution in 1989 and whose members worked for the biggest news organisations in the world. The men and woman who worked for the agency are extraordinary individuals prepared to take enormous risks to cover the story - and who, where possible, travelled in style, the agency was founded over a Christmas lunch of wild boar, in the middle of a revolution.

One of the founders of the agency, Peter Jouvenal, is the cameraman who filmed John Simpson on his famous walk into Kabul in 2001. Vaughan Smith, another founder, managed to bluff his way into embedding with US forces and filmed the only real combat footage of the first Gulf War, everything else was tightly controlled. The risks are real, Rory Peck was killed reporting for Frontline as was Nick della Casa, alongside his wife Rosanna and brother-in-law, Charlie Maxwell) and so many others, their photographs grouped together on a memorial wall in the Frontline offices.

This book should be required reading for all journalists and documentary makers, to remind them not only of the risks they take, but of the fun that can be had along the way. This is also an important, but fairly politically neutral, account of the various wars and conflicts which flared up during the last decade of the Twentieth Century and the international reaction, or, sadly in many cases, how these conflicts were ignored or mismanaged by the international community. ( )