Giles Foden

The lure of adventure

A few minutes’ walk from Paddington Station is a drinking den and restaurant called the Frontline Club, a members’ club for foreign correspondents.

issue 10 July 2010

A few minutes’ walk from Paddington Station is a drinking den and restaurant called the Frontline Club, a members’ club for foreign correspondents.

A few minutes’ walk from Paddington Station is a drinking den and restaurant called the Frontline Club, a members’ club for foreign correspondents. Among the characters you might find banging on the bar, wedged between Rick Beeston of the Times, Jason Burke of the Observer, and gentleman freelancers such as Aidan Hartley or Sam Kiley, is James Brabazon, an award-winning documentary filmmaker specialising in war zones.

Though there are plenty of female stars, such as the redoubtable Marie Colvin, with her fantastic hair and piratical eye-patch, this is still a fairly macho world. Like the Goldman Sachs boys, foreign correspondents make sheep and goats distinctions between those who are (in the parlance) ‘big swinging dicks’ and those who are not. Brabazon’s book My Friend the Mercenary tells the intriguing tale of how he became one.

The story begins in a luxury hotel in Johannesburg in 2002.

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