11 Quotes by Lindsey Hilsum

Palestinian youths used stones and marbles, often in slingshots, to taunt young Israeli soldiers, who shot back with tear gas and live fire. The Palestinians always came off worse. Funerals would turn into protests and so it would roll on, violence ebbing and escalating, the world transfixed by the desperation of a Palestinian generation who saw no future.

Someone muttered something in Arabic. Paul asked a young man who spoke some English to translate. “He says things must be serious in Syria: first they send young journalists, but now they send us a woman, a pensioner, and an idiot who wants to go back.

Miller wrote, “I want to have the utopian combination of security and freedom.

I explained that she might be one of the main targets of the regime, but she wasn’t listening,” he recalls. “She was only focused on human suffering, on children dying. I thought I could work with this person because she has no ideology, she’s just concerned with human beings.

Marie was well enough to be amused by the contrast between the American and British response to her situation. The British High Commission, she told Farrell, had sent a diplomat in a Laura Ashley skirt, carrying a parasol, who told her there was nothing they could do – after all, Marie had gone to the north illegally. “Marie said she had never been more grateful to be an American,” he recalls.

It doesn’t matter if you mess up, choose the wrong road, flop in Vegas. What’s important is to throw yourself in head first, to “go for the gusto.” And if you blow it, you blow it. What we have to worry about now is success. Once you’re successful, it becomes embarrassing to make mistakes, and more difficult to grab onto the nearest straw and hold on. You can always be a star, so what’s the rush?

She was the champion of bearing witness so that even if no one stopped the wars, they could never say they had not known what was happening.

Yet Marie’s was a true faith, and she believed it utterly. She still had her American seriousness of purpose, her heart proudly visible on her sleeve, uncorrupted by British cynicism. She was the champion of bearing witness so that even if no one stopped the wars, they could never say they had not known what was happening.

An eye for detail, the ability to conjure a scene, and scant regard for her own safety were to become trademarks of her journalism.