With war again disfiguring many parts of the world, Phillip Knightley’s classic could not be more relevant. ‘The first casualty when war comes, is truth’, said American Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917.’ Phillip Knightley shows just how right Johnson was. From William Howard Russell, who described the appalling conditions of the Crimean War in the Times [London], to the ranks of reporters, photographers, and cameramen who captured the realities of war in Vietnam, The First Casualty tells a fascinating story of heroism and collusion, censorship and suppression, myth-making and propaganda. Since Vietnam, Knightley finds, governments have become much more adept at managing the media, and in new chapters on the Falklands, the Gulf War, and the former Yugoslavia, he finds that the war correspondent’s role as a seeker of truth is in jeopardy.