John Simpson is the BBC's World Affairs Editor, the senior member of a team of London-based foreign and specialist correspondents.

In a BBC career spanning 40 years, John has earned a reputation as one of the world's most experienced and authoritative journalists.

His first job with the BBC was as a trainee sub-editor in Radio News in 1966.

Four decades later, he has reported from 120 countries across the globe, from 36 war zones, and has interviewed more than 150 kings, presidents and prime ministers.

His assignments have included the great majority of big international news stories since the Eighties: the Iranian revolution against the Shah (when he flew to Tehran with Ayatollah Khomeini), the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and in Russia itself, Tiananmen Square, the Gulf War, the wars in Bosnia, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, their overthrow in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq two years later.

Since then he has reported regularly from Baghdad.

During the Kosovo crisis of 1999, John reported from Belgrade.

He was one of only a handful of journalists to remain in the Serbian capital when NATO began its bombing campaign.

"As everyone else was pulling out I decided I would just stay put and see what happened," he said.

For the next 12 weeks he filed reports every day and often round-the-clock for all BBC outlets, and was the first BBC journalist in a war zone to answer questions from internet users via BBC News Online.

In April 2000, he was named Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year for his reporting of the conflict.

In a career which makes visiting trouble spots a way of life, John says he rarely fears for his safety - even when a Palestinian soldier ordered him to kneel in the road and pulled the trigger.

Other close shaves include being shelled in Afghanistan, bombed with poison gas in the Iran-Iraq War and dodging the bullets in Tiananmen Square.

During the invasion of Iraq in 2003 he and his team were bombed by the Americans in the north of the country, in the worst 'friendly fire' incident of the war. 18 people were killed, but John and his team were able to continue broadcasting from the scene.

His experience of trouble started early: in 1970, on his first day as a reporter, he was punched by then British Prime Minister Harold Wilson for asking whether he was about to call an election.

John was appointed World Affairs Editor in 1988 following periods as Political Editor, Diplomatic Editor and presenter of the BBC ONE Nine O'Clock News.

Before that he worked as a correspondent in South Africa, Brussels and Dublin.

John also presents the current and political affairs programme, Simpson's World, which is broadcast on both BBC World and BBC News 24. Seen in 200 countries, Simpson's World has interviewed more than 100 people in over 40 countries.

His books include an autobiography, Strange Places, Questionable People (1998), and several accounts of his journalistic experiences: A Mad World, My Masters (2000); News From No Man's Land (2002), The Wars Against Saddam (2003), and Days From A Different World (2005).

John received a CBE in the Gulf War Honours (1991), and is one of only two people to have been twice named the Royal Television Society's Journalist of the Year (1991 and 2000).

Among his other awards have been three Baftas, a Golden Nymph award for his reporting of Ayatollah Khomeini's return to Iran (1979), a Peabody Trust award for news (1999), a special jury's award at the Bayeux War Correspondents Awards (2002), an International Emmy award for News Coverage for his report on the fall of Kabul for BBC ONE's Ten O'Clock News, and an RTS award for his reporting during the invasion of Iraq.

Born on 9 August 1944, John was brought up in London and Suffolk, and educated at St Paul's School and Magdalene College, Cambridge where he read English, and edited the magazine Granta.

He has two daughters by his first marriage, and a son (born 2006) by his second wife, Dee, who worked for the BBC in her native South Africa and was the first producer of Simpson's World. They live in London and Paris.

In 2000 Magdalene College awarded John an honorary fellowship, and in 2005 he was made Chancellor of Roehampton University. He holds honorary doctorates from six universities altogether.

Some people just aren't cut out for the suburbs. As one of the BBC's top foreign correspondents, John Simpson has been at the epicentre of many of the world's flashpoints for more than 30 years. Afghanistan, Belgrade, Hong Kong, Baghdad; you name it, he's been there. And what's more, he hasn't just met the great and the good, such as Clinton and Blair, he's met the top bogey men, too. He's had Osama Bin Laden pleading with some Afghani guerrillas to kill him and his crew, he's interviewed Emperor Bokassa, Colonel Gadhafi and Arkan and had close up dealings with Saddam Hussein. And it goes without saying he was one of the first people in the entire world to see in the new millennium on the specially named Millennium Island, which the Kiribati government claimed just squeezed inside the international date line.

Small wonder, then, that Simpson is a source of dozens of good stories. Many of these have been written up elsewhere in his autobiographical Strange Places, Questionable People, but there are plenty left over for this latest book in which Simpson eschews chronology and just sticks to some plain old-fashioned story telling, with sections on villains, spies, icons etc. Unsurprisingly, Simpson has a journalistic eye for detail and nuance and never holds back from telling you the things you want to know; so when he went to interview Bokassa, he managed to sneak a look inside his giant deep freeze to see if there were any human body parts. It sounds trivial but it isn't; in a strange sort of way the examination of the contents of a deep freeze can be every bit as revealing as an hour on a shrink's couch.

Simpson is a genial companion, not much given to introspection, and the book races seamlessly from anecdote to anecdote. And yet underpinning the narrative is Simpson's global malaise, a feeling that everywhere in the world is becoming more and more similar and that it's increasingly hard to find anywhere genuinely wild and remote. Simpson has been to many of those places, but the way he describes them makes them seem fairly similar in their own kind of way. McDonalds and the Gap may be thin on the ground, but there are bullets and danger aplenty. To have been to so many of these places is an achievement in itself; to have returned unscathed is a minor miracle; John Simpson has led a charmed life in more ways than one.