There comes a moment in every foreign correspondent’s life when he decides the time has come to write The Book that truly explains what is most vital and important about the country to which he has devoted his career. Commonly this takes the form of an account of the reporter’s own personal physical and spiritual journey through country X, interspersed with asides on its literature, culture and history. This genre of reportage has spawned some of the greatest writing in journalism – Edward Behr’s Anyone Here Been Raped & Speaks English?’, Martha Gellhorn’s The Face of War, John Swain’s River of Time. But the picaresque jaunt also risks collapsing into a portmanteau of feeble anecdote and facile history.