and write them down - as if they were almost compelled by the drama of the occasion to do so.

Take Pliny the Younger seeing Vesuvius blow up in AD 79, describing it as if it happened yesterday: "It was not clear at that distance from which mountain the cloud was rising (it was afterwards known to be Vesuvius); its general appearance can best be expressed as being like an umbrella pine, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches..."

Putting together some thousand different kinds of eyewitness reports for a new anthology (covering more than 4,000 years), I am convinced that great reporters are born and not made. They are driven by an innate curiosity to tell the tale in their own inimitable way. One of the best and most beguilingly brilliant was Rene Cutforth, a soldier in the Second World War, and a reporter in the Korean War. He was the best story-teller I have ever known - and in the end one almost didn't know or care if the tales were true, or not.

In his autobiography, written originally for radio, he describes the end of the war in Europe for

him in a scene of bonfires and lynchings and liberated Polish and Russian women prisoners in Hermann Goring Strasse in Lollar. "The other end of the street was Polish, and here a manic figure with rapt face and streaming hair had claimed as his loot a huge grand piano. It was chocked up on an island in the middle of the street, and there all night among the bonfires below the corpses, the mad Pole played on."

Part of the magic of Cutforth and Ernie Pyle - greatest of 'embed' reporters, who was killed at Iwo Jima in 1945 - is that they avoided the excesses of the cult of celebrity, the bane of too many reporters today. They wanted the celebrity to be in the people they spoke of in their copy. Too often now reporters seem as preoccupied with their own status as with the story - a vice to which icons of the trade like Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn were no strangers.

One great reporter who would never become a household name was Kurt Schork of Reuters, killed in Sierra Leone in 2005. As an agency man his byline rarely appeared in newspapers. Some of his pieces from the siege of Sarajevo will live as long as reporters report. This was filed