Best-selling author, journalist and commentator Robert Fisk has reported from the Middle East for more than three decades, covering eleven major wars, countless insurgencies, massacres and political crises. Based in Beirut for a long time as the Middle East correspondent for The Independent, Fisk holds more British and international journalism awards than almost any other foreign correspondent, has received six honorary doctorate degrees, and written a number of books including The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East—an eyewitness history of the region's tragedy that was published to great critical acclaim in 2005. He spoke to Tutul Dasgupta on the phone, from his cottage in a village in the Republic of Ireland.