Barely two years out of university, with a history degree specialised in the French Revolution, I was catapulted into covering a live revolution as epochal – and bloody – as the French and Russian convulsions. As a trainee correspondent for Reuters in Paris, I befriended exiled Iranian revolutionaries hanging out in the Latin Quarter in the months before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was expelled from Iraq in 1978 and granted temporary asylum in France.