Paperback review: Battling for News - Women Reporters from the Risorgimento to Tiananmen Square, By Anne Sebba

Faber is to be applauded for re-releasing this superb 1994 history of women reporters through its Faber Finds series (although one might wish for a more attractive cover, or a more competitive e-book price), with Sebba's new preface, highlighting particularly the appalling case of Lara Logan, sexually assaulted by a crowd while covering the uprising in Cairo.

Sebba's history of women reporting abroad is a more positive one, though, tracing the careers of journalistic stars including Martha Gellhorn and Rebecca West, as well as the less well-known but no less heroic Clare Hollingworth (who used her smaller size to good effect to help squeeze through a crowd to a much-needed phone box), and Peggy Hull, the only woman to "approach professional recognition" during the First World War, when female reporters were not allowed accreditation.