HERE are those familiar faces - including John Simpson, Gavin Hewitt, Stephen Sackur and rising star Rageh Omaar - we grew to know and love (or not) during Gulf War II.

What this book brought home to me was how hindsight really is a wonderful thing and how much more information can be conveyed via the printed word - which is why, like so many others, I prefer newspapers to TV if I really want to know what's going on.

Remove Simpson's increasingly overbearing personality from the picture, for example, and he comes across as informed and incisive in his profile of Saddam Hussein.

I particularly liked Evan Davis's economic analysis of the background to war, and the way Matt Frei points out how much more there is to George W Bush than the cowboy caricature we're so often lazily presented with.

There's not enough here on the way reporters were "embedded" with the American and British forces, and whether or not it was a good thing - but there is plenty to get you thinking, unlike much of the broadcast material, which was mainly for gawping at.

Kevin Nash