I have seen heroics - soldiers saving other soldiers' lives - and horrors.

In popular Egyptian and regional culture, women are seen as weak, easy victims to temptation in the same way Eve couldn't resist that shiny apple in the Garden of Eden.

The Taliban may pine for a pre-industrial society, but most Afghans do not.

Once you start bombing in Syria, when you start looking for targets, there will be a lot.

The Sahara is Africa's great divide.

In 2009, Hamas was relatively new to power. It had won elections just three years earlier and was flexing its newfound strength via a war with its old enemy, Israel, which it officially wants destroyed.

The truth was, there was never a connection between Iraq and Osama Bin Laden. There were no weapons of mass destruction, either.

Persia is 7,000 years old and will fight to survive.

Traditionally, all the kings of Saudi Arabia have been sons of the founder of Saudi Arabia, and they've gone from one son to the next.

Anyone who follows the Middle East and Islamic world in general can't deny it is often a very violent place, that a band of instability now stretches from Algeria to Pakistan.

Mali exists mostly to itself. Few people go there. Few Malians leave. Most of Mali's 13 million people live, and seem to live quite happily, off the rice, corn and millet they grow and the long-horn cattle and goats they keep.

If Syria collapses completely, the United States and the world would have to consider who, and what, fills the vacuum.

Shaped like Texas, but twice as big, Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world. It exports almost nothing - mostly just cotton, gold and livestock - and doesn't have enough money to import much of anything, either.

Under a decades-old agreement, Palestinian refugee camps are supposed to administer and police themselves. Lebanese troops are technically not allowed to enter them.

Afghanistan was always a backwater in the Islamic world.

Damascus was the seat of the Ummayad Caliphate in the 7th and 8th centuries.

The Muslim Prophet Mohammed was a big believer in charity and firmly established helping those in need as a basis of the religion.

We're all bloggers and punks and rebels with cameras. There is absolutely no respect for career journalists anymore.

Every country where the the United States maintains troops has a status of forces agreement.

Some Iraqi troops aren't willing to fight for their government. But many Shiites appear willing to fight for their religious leaders.

Osama bin Laden organized an attack that was carried out against the United States, New York, Pentagon, and the other aircraft, with 19 attackers, 19 guys with box cutters. An attack that probably cost almost nothing.

The people of Gaza are trapped. Israel has sealed the border, and they have no way to leave the Gaza Strip to do business.

Assad's regime helped ISIS grow by attacking other opposition forces and rarely targeting ISIS.

Many governments are quick to condemn Assad, but a dwindling number of them would celebrate a rebel victory in Damascus.

Kidnapping is always a threat in this life of reporting on men hurting one another because of religion and politics.

I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long - wisely, I felt - shirked the challenge because I felt it the hardest story of all to write.

'The Bradshaws' is the appropriately inappropriate English title given to an enigma - some hundreds of thousands of mysterious rock art paintings scattered through the wilds of the Kimberley, an area larger than Germany in the remote, scarcely populated northwest of Australia.

The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles.

Everything about The Bradshaws is controversial, fluid, uncertain: their age - perhaps 30,000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps more recent - who painted them, what they mean.

The 2007 Labor campaign was the most presidential in Australian history, with a slogan - Kevin07 - exceeded in its banality only by its success.

Black Saturday reminded many Australians of what they know only too well: that of all the advanced economies, Australia is perhaps the one most vulnerable to climate change.

It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia.

Under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss.

For much of the latter part of the 20th century, Australia seemed to be opening up to something large and good. It believed itself a generous country, the land of the 'fair go.'

In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.

I have met Aborigines younger than me who used to hide every time anyone official came round their camp for fear of being taken away.

I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected with it.

What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.

Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.

I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.

Nothing seemed to offer more striking proof to the late Victorian mind of the infernal truth of social Darwinism than the supposed demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

Through the 1990s, the fracturing of Tasmanian Aboriginal politics was given impetus by the ongoing corruption of a number of black organisations started under federal government programmes, with large amounts of public money being lost.

Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity.

The survival of extraordinary creatures such as the giant Tasmanian freshwater crayfish - the largest in the world - is in doubt because of logging.

Logging is an industry driven solely by greed. It prospers with government support and subsidies, and it is accelerating its rate of destruction, so that Tasmania is now the largest hardwood chip exporter in the world.

Since woodchipping began 32 years ago, Tasmanians have watched as one extraordinary place after another has been sacrificed. Beautiful places, holy places, lost not only to them, but forever.

Within white Australia, there was a growing movement for what was known as reconciliation - a movement that peaked with millions marching in 2000 to demand the government say sorry for past injustices.

Under Howard, federal government support for black Australia slowly dried up. Services were slashed, native title restricted.

History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.

A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others.