'In those days, it was a natural progression,' Hirst says of his move from the university to the press. After completing a degree at Oxford, he decided to return to Lebanon, enrolling at the American University in Beirut in 1959, and stayed there when he was offered a job as The Guardian's Middle East correspondent. Nonetheless, he must have caught some bug. 'I knew nothing about the Middle East and hardly knew the difference between Israelis and Arabs.' Living there between 19, he took the opportunity to travel around the Levant, leaving shortly before the Suez War. Max Rodenbeck, the Middle East correspondent for The Economist, says:, 'David is the kind of person who will stay silent throughout an animated political conversation for an hour, and then quietly come out with a statement of devastating insight.' Still waters run deep, it seems, and Hirst's writings betray a quiet but relentless outrage on behalf of the region he has made his home for over half a century.īorn in 1936 to a middle-class family in England, educated at Rugby, a posh boarding school, at 18 Hirst was sent to do his military service (then still compulsory) in Egypt and Cyprus. Hirst's demeanour - a slight frame, donnish oversize spectacles on a round head, a quiet, lilting voice and a very English self-effacement reminiscent of John LeCarré's unlikely spymaster, George Smiley - is also the opposite of Fisk's.

In his recent memoir, Dining with al Qaeda, Hugh Pope - another veteran foreign correspondent in the region - says Hirst was one of the correspondents he respected most, particularly after witnessing a scene in which Hirst, 'a slight and utterly unphysical man, evaded his would-be kidnappers in the vital first few minutes by kicking and shouting as they tried to force him from the street into a basement.' Hirst is one of the most respected journalists of his generation, recognised by his peers as an eminently meticulous chronicler of Middle Eastern affairs. But Fisk isn't the only ageing Briton to have made Lebanon home: David Hirst, in fact, has been there longer, written more books, and - among journalists, anyway - attracted more admiration than the divisive Fisk. Most people would point to Robert Fisk, the hot-headed correspondent for The Independent, who has been lionised (and demonised) for his jeremiads against American and Israeli policy. Here's a question for you: who is the British journalist who has lived in Lebanon for decades, knows the region inside and out, writes weighty and influential tomes about regional politics, takes positions that are controversial in the United States and is not terribly fond of Israel?

Beware of Small States by David Hirst