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I stared at the dead's man face, a blank testament to its owner's long absence. What had he seen? What had he known? He had been a part of the same world as us but in the year since his death that world had changed and moved on and he had not.

I learned that the forensic pathologist was called to any suspicious death at any time of the day or night, and that might mean to the actual scene of an actual murder.

There is a small black-and-white picture of my father with a large, leggy child, who must be me, enveloped in his lap. Both of us are asleep. This picture is most unusual for its time. Post-war men, on the whole, had been brought up by Victorian fathers and simply did not know how to show their sons such a degree of love and kindness.

I have a family, I work for them. Do you have any idea what it means to support a family? What could you possibly understand?

In 2021, Russian courts oversaw the trials of 783,000 people. Of these, exactly 2,190 were found innocent. Two thousand one hundred and ninety. The probability of somebody charged with a crime being exonerated was 0.28 percent.

Some people simply have addictive personalities. They can’t help themselves.

Heinrich Dreser, one of the German chemists at Bayer who is credited with inventing heroin, is rumoured to have become addicted to the drug himself and died of a stroke in 1924.

But passport stamps and wide vocabularies are neither wisdom nor morality. As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it.

At the top of the sketch there was a handwritten caption, “Daddy reads all the time” and another at the bottom, “Daddy says he reads to learn.” The captions were mine.

Evil did win, sometimes, maybe most times. Bad things did happen, if only for the simple reason that they could.

Russians have a saying, “Moscow isn’t Russia and Russia isn’t Moscow.”

'Why should I swear to you?' laughed Agafya. 'I'll look after them anyway.'

'No, only if you swear on the eternal salvation of your soul. Otherwise, I won't go.'

His father had left a bookcase in which were kept some books; Kolya loved reading, and he had already read several of them. His mother found this incomprehensible, and was sometimes simply astonished to see the boy standing by the bookcase for hours on end, poring over some book instead of going out to play.

"Me and her dad have the same birthday, March 28th. It's messed up!"

And I was left without a brother. I never visited his grave again. I simply couldn't.

I would ask Mama, if the USSR was such a good country, why didn’t you stand up for it? Mama would say, we were deceived. Yeltsin lied to us.

Was anyone going to care about this story, I wondered. Did people have any empathy left? Yet another corner of the world was witnessing unspeakable cruelty.

"I can't wait to be in Jannah (paradise)," Israfil wrote to me one night. "Just walking around this beautiful garden and eating delicious fruit."

"Is that how you imagine paradise?" I asked.

"It's described quite clearly in the Quran."

"Imagine you're drowning, that you're about to die, and you're desperately looking for anyone to help you, but there's nobody there," he said. "But then you see someone holding out their hand. Maybe you don't like the look of that person, but it's your only chance to survive. So you take their hand."

I had spent days watching 60 Minutes interviews. Morley Safer. Steve Kroft. Bob Simon. Ed Bradley. Mike Wallace. Lesley Stahl. Each of them had their own inimitable style. It was a joy to study them.

I learned that Ayman had eight children, four of them daughters. He lived in a town near Aleppo called Tal Rifa'at, and his biggest fear was that he would soon have to marry off his eldest daughter, just fifteen years old, because he could not afford to feed them all.

I remember one Syrian woman telling me that if you can hear the jets, you're OK. If you're about to get killed you don't hear anything.

"Don't underestimate yourself. You're no babe in the woods. You remind me of that chick from Game of Thrones, Khaleesi, mother of dragons."

Covering war is a bit like being a trauma surgeon in ER, though of course we are not saving lives. But when things get bloody, you have to take a deep breath and immerse yourself completely in your job, switching off any human response to the horror of what's happening.

She looked down at her tea as she stirred the spoon around and around. I knew at once that I had upset her, that by suggesting the impossible I had only reminded her that the world she so wanted to see was not really open to her, that her lot had already been cast.

"Clarissa, I need to ask you. Can you help me get my family to the West?"
It was a question I would be asked dozens and dozens of times as a reporter working in some of the most dangerous places in the world. And it would not get any easier to answer.

"War is hell," someone toasted ironically, and we all raised our drinks and laughed.
"War is hell!"
I had no idea.

The plane bounced down onto the runway and a South African voice drawled through the intercom. South African crews operated the Royal Jordanian flights to Baghdad from Amman, it seemed they were the only ones willing to risk the corkscrew.

There was no sound other than the water gently running and her whispering "Bismillah ar rahman ar raheem" (In the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful).

My father had given me a copy of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina when I was a teenager. I quickly fell in love with both the writing and Anna as a character. I remember telling my parents over dinner, with tears in my eyes, that I was devastated by Anna's suicide.

My mother had a taken a sip of her cocktail and waved her hand dismissively. "You have to toughen up, Clarissa. Anna was a slut."