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Good morning. For years I’ve been a huge fan of Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times war correspondent who was killed by a bomb in Syria in 2016. She is now the subject of a film A Private War, starring Rosamund Pike in the title role. Her portrayal emphasises Marie’s heroic qualities and makes a powerful story. You would know Marie Colvin by her scorching prose, her concern for human suffering, and the eyepatch she wore after she was injured in a rocket blast in Sri Lanka. She once rescued 1500 women and children from a besieged compound in East Timor. In the last few weeks an American court has demanded over 300 million dollars from the Syrian government, after it produced proof that her death was a planned assassination. Like many who are regarded as heroes Marie Colvin was a much more complicated human being than any film portrait can allow. She may indeed have been on a moral crusade but, according to some who knew her well, she experienced war and suffering as an addictive drug. Another former war correspondent, David Lloyd, reviewing the film said that it could never truly reveal the extent to which she and others were simply thrilled by danger; how war could be tremendous fun, heaven compared with the hell of ordinary life. He summed it up by saying, ‘Great reporting is often the flipside of driven, wounded individuals, keen to give voice to the oppressed’. Marie Colvin’s work was what she lived for, and she was rightly acclaimed both for her compassion and her courage. But there was a cost. Her heavy drinking and complicated personal life is well-attested by those who knew her. I met people a bit like Marie when I worked in television documentaries. People who passionately wanted to bear witness to the truth, who had a genuine empathy for the vulnerable but who sometimes put themselves and those they worked with in serious danger. It is easy to ascribe to such people a kind of cult status, turning them into heroes, victims and martyrs all at once. No one will deny that being a reporter on the world stage is dangerous. 54 journalists were killed last year; 34 of them murdered, targets of gangsters, terrorists and governments. I have always seen in the journalist’s life a parallel with the lives of the Old Testament prophets. They, too, testified to the wars and oppressions of their times. They exulted at the thrill of what they believed to be God’s judgment enacted on his enemies. And they sometimes suffered horribly from anxiety and depression. As I think of those who risk their lives to tell the truth about war I am reminded that their work is not only a witness to the conflict of good and evil in the world, but can also be a fight with their own inner demons. Sometimes the hardest truth to face is the truth about ourselves.