Kate, queen of news

I'd like to think the Chinese security man she kicked in the groin to protect her precious film of the atrocities was never quite the same man again.

Even though flying bullets and exploding shells punctuate the book plentifully, the less gung-ho sections work equally well, even if many readers might appreciate a bit more about Adie's personal life, always assuming she has one (the blurb tells us that she is 'fundamentally a private person').

She is very good on her idyllic childhood and a school trip to Cold War Berlin, where Russian MiGs practised strafing runs at roof-top level and American tanks ground through the cobbled streets.

Like myself, Adie saw an awful lot of Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles and she, too, succumbed gradually to the surreal blend of extreme violence and rabid sectarianism with the extraordinary warmth and generosity of ordinary people caught up in a nightmare. Her description of first seeing Belfast 'with filthy coal-fire smoke topping it like a thick grey pie-crust' takes some beating, as does that of the exhausted, nerve-shredded working-class women on both sides of the divide, 'shiny-faced with tranquillisers'.

Though Adie's reporting from Bosnia and Beijing earned various well-deserved gongs, I was most absorbed by her account of the American bombing of Tripoli in 1986, when the Reagan administration decided a terrorist attack on a Berlin disco merited devastating retaliation against Libya.

Adie knew Libya well and while she was delighted to discover that the barmy Colonel Gaddafi's long-suffering subjects worshipped Monty Python's Flying Circus - 'because that's our country they're showing' - she felt he was no longer in the major league of international evildoers.

After the bombers had done their work, Adie faithfully reported the facts before her eyes: the Colonel's headquarters were destroyed but residential areas far from it had also been devastated, killing many innocent civilians (among them Gaddafi's adopted daughter).

As a result, she records dispassionately: 'I almost lost my job due to political pressure from politicians (sub-text: Mrs Thatcher) responsible for authorising the use of British military facilities for the raid.'

As the row intensified, Adie stood by every word of her outstanding dispatches - for that alone she deserves her OBE - and, thankfully, the Beeb stood by her. Would today's ratings-obsessed management suits, whom she assails for recruiting female journalists on the basis of looks rather than talent, do the same for her today?