Culture | In the widows’ basement

The life and death of a courageous war reporter

Marie Colvin was often the first correspondent into a hotspot, and the last out

The price of bravery

In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin. By Lindsey Hilsum. Chatto & Windus; 437 pages; $28 and £20.

FIGHTING WARS has generally been seen as the concern of men—and so has writing about them. Yet at the height of the turmoil after the Arab spring, women covered all the region’s conflicts, including for The Economist. Most female reporters do not want to be typecast, but might acknowledge that their gender influences their work, just as it does for men. It can help: women in the Middle East tend to be less visible at (for example) checkpoints, especially if they wear a headscarf. They can be welcomed into female-only domains. Male interviewees often open up to them.

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Marie Colvin, the roving war reporter for the Sunday Times from 1985 until her death in Syria in 2012, at the age of 55, thought female journalists distinguished themselves by focusing on people rather than the bang-bang. She got close to Muammar Qaddafi and Yasser Arafat, but, as this intimate biography by Lindsey Hilsum, a fellow (female) reporter, shows, her gift was writing, passionately, about ordinary lives during war; “humanity in extremis”, she called it. Her fateful last piece was on “the widows’ basement” in Baba Amr, a district of Homs, where bereaved women and children huddled as Syrian forces starved and shelled them to death.

With the help of Colvin’s diaries, Ms Hilsum deftly explores her complex motives. Her troubled relationship with her father pushed her to succeed. Like most war correspondents, she wanted to outdo the competition; seeing death made life more vibrant, as did the adrenalin buzz of near misses. But she was spurred to go further than her peers primarily because she thought she could make a difference through her work—or just her presence. In East Timor in 1999 she refused to leave as Indonesian troops approached a UN compound where refugees were sheltering.

She was often the first, or only, reporter to go in, and the last out, even if that meant trekking over a mountain range, as she did to escape from Chechnya in 1999. She lost an eye to a grenade in Sri Lanka in 2001. But by the time of the Arab spring, war reporting had changed. Nasty regimes overtly treated journalists as enemies. And they could find them easily, thanks to live reporting on social media and Skype interviews. Evidence suggests that the Syrian regime set out to murder Colvin, who was killed by a rocket (her family is taking legal action against Syria’s government).

Ms Hilsum’s portrait is greatly enhanced by its frankness. Colvin could be reckless. She had already been into Baba Amr and got her story, but returned against advice and without telling her editor. Sometimes she cut corners for a cause. She described a baby’s death in Baba Amr on the basis of a video rather than (as she implied) her own observations, because, the book suggests, she thought the image would move readers to think about Syria’s plight.

Few who see war avoid trauma; it is hard to switch between the extremes of conflict and humdrum domesticity. Ms Hilsum unflinchingly depicts Colvin’s alcohol abuse, the breakdown she suffered and her tumultuous relationships. Women war correspondents struggle to balance work and personal life in specifically female ways, too. Colvin wanted to be a mother, but by the time she had made her name, it turned out to be too late.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "In the widows’ basement"

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