And I think, in the end, that is the best definition of journalism I have heard; to challenge authority - all authority - especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.

War is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.

After the allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career - in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad - watching the people within those borders burn.