Martin Bell, the former BBC war reporter and Independent MP, served as a soldier in the Suffolk Regiment during the Cyprus emergency between 1957 and 1959. In a chocolate box in the attic many years later he found more than 100 letters that he had sent home to his family. He was not a journalist then, but the letters give a vivid impression of what it was like to be a conscript on active service during the EOKA rebellion against British rule. They describe road blocks and cordons and searches, murders and explosions and riots and a strategy of armed repression that ultimately failed. From...

Following a sixty-year journey from war to peace, from soldier to UNICEF ambassador, Martin Bell reflects on war and peacekeeping, and where they stand today