The fascination with wars and uprisings started, I suppose, in Romania in 1989 when I was visiting as the revolution to overthrow the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu began. The first time I heard gunfire it terrified me.

From there going to Yugoslavia as it began it's bloody break-up was a natural progression. Using the car of a company I worked for in Budapest, I headed, first with my brother, later with a friend, to Croatia and then Bosnia.

For a young western man Sarajevo in 1992 was an eye-opener. An ordinary European city, it had been turned into a macabre hunting ground as snipers and artillerymen sought to kill and maim its residents into submission.

Men in suits zig-zagged their way across streets marked "Beware Sniper" as they went to the office. Electricity and water had been cut off by the Serb nationalists in the surrounding mountains. Thousands of civilians died.

I left Sarajevo that summer, embittered. The son of a Welsh mother and a Hungarian father and born in London, I felt sorely betrayed, as a British citizen, as a European, as an ordinary human being.

The Conservative British government at the time was not only refusing to help the victims of this brutal aggression but also imposed barriers when others tried to do so.

The explanation, given in off-the-record briefings to journalists, was that the Bosnia war had to be "contained" so as to prevent a war in Kosovo. That basically meant ignoring the massacres.

In the autumn of 1992 I returned to northern Bosnia, where the Serb ethnic cleaning machine was in full swing, to find scenes of biblical suffering. It was just as the names Omarska and Prijedor were becoming by-words for brutality.

In the north thousands of mostly Muslim refugees, each of them with a baked, unwashed smell that the long-term dispossessed seem to unwittingly carry, had been herded into corridors where they were shot at and shelled.

Scared and angry, I fled Bosnia for London and vowed never to return. But the draw - born of both fascination and disgust - gnawed at me even as I watched the images of suffering form afar.

In early 1993 I signed a contract with The Daily Telegraph and became their Hungary stringer. I wrote a short story every couple of months and they paid me a few pounds for each effort.

As time passed I expanded my patch to write about Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria too. Then in 1995 I went back to Yugoslavia. The Telegraph were reluctant to pay so I did a simple deal with a German colleague. I drove him around, he picked up my expenses.

Together we saw the Croats kick the Serbs out of Krajina, the liberation of Muslim-held Bihac in the far north-west of Bosnia, and a little later, the Dayton Peace Accord and the end of the war.

The next spring The Daily Telegraph gave me my first wage, £400 a month, and I moved to Bosnia full-time.

From my beautiful, crumbling flat in Sarajevo's old town, I travelled all over - Belgrade, Tirana, Sofia, Bucharest and, of course, throughout Bosnia.

It was a time of vicious spats and dirty little killings, revenge and retribution as nationalists of all hues settled scores. But against the odds the peace held and the hatred slowly, slowly drained away.

I spent most of the next five years in the Balkans (although I did take six months off to get a commercial and aerobatic pilot's licence in Canada.) I covered the wild uprising in Albania and the Belgrade student demonstrations.

Then came the Kosovo war where I covered more massacres than I care to remember. There were a small number of us there who seemed never to leave the place and together we ignored the bullets, rode the checkpoints and hid in holes when the shells came close.

In 1999 I was in Belgrade just in time to watch the Nato bombing campaign begin. Arrested and deported, I returned only to be arrested and deported again, this time with a warning that I would go to jail as a spy if I returned.

For a year I skirted Serbia, covering Montenegro and Kosovo. Then finally, when I could bear it no longer, I slipped across the northern border disguised as a Hungarian businessman just two days before the Milosevic regime fell.

That night, as smoke rose over the parliament, I remember sitting in a jazz bar in Belgrade with an old friend - the very same German colleague I had started out driving for in Bosnia. It seemed that we were waving good-bye to an era.

Since I left the Balkans that year, life has been far from sedentary. There was a nerve-wracking stint in Sierra Leone, one of the worst of Africa's civil wars. My brother was kidnapped there and escaped. A friend was killed.

My nerves shot to pieces, I once again retreated to Canada. I bought a camper van and, braving the frigid temperatures of January, drove it north past the 60th parallel. Later I returned to cover Macedonia's little war.

Then came 9/11. A month later I was in Afghanistan, living with a warlord and going to work on horse-back. After weeks of bombing, the Americans eventually prevailed, the Taliban fell and I went to Kabul.

Later there were more trips to Afghanistan, the death of another friend in Gaza, and 12 weeks of northern Iraq covering the Kurds and the forgotten and dangerous war in the north as the world's attention fell on the south and Baghdad.

In the autumn of 2002 I had moved to Russia as the Daily Telegraph's Moscow Correspondent and when the Iraqi war was over it was there I returned.

The previous autumn I had reported on the attack on the Nord Ost theatre in Moscow when 50 Chechen rebels seized more than 800 hostages. The Russians subdued the attackers with gas and then shot them, but 130 innocents died from gas inhalation. I broke through the security cordon and stood there watching them die, powerless to help.

That was the first time I saw the Russian Spetsnaz in action. There was something intriguing about their bravery, their brutality and their sheer callousness. For months I sought a way into the secretive unit and I was finally allowed to join a Russian Spetsnaz unit in the Chechen capital Grozny.

After and a brutal initiation trial - seemingly endless shots of vodka, a grotesquely hot Russian steam bath and a trip on top of an armoured personnel carrier as it raced through Grozny - I was welcomed almost as a friend.

Later I returned to Chechnya to write about the kidnapping of widows by Russian security forces and the rule of fear the Russians imposed on villagers in the mutinous and mountainous south of the republic.

In the summer of 2004 I returned to Iraq to cover the uprising. I went into battle with the anti-American Shiite militias in Najaf and wrote the story of a quiet Texan who lost the love of his life only to become the best sniper in Iraq.

In September I was at the school in Beslan in southern Russia for the bloody and disturbing denouement of a hostage crisis when more than 300 civilians, half of them children were killed. The images of so many dead children left my nerves frazzled.

Finally, after more than a decade covering many of the world’s major conflicts, I decided to take a break. In the summer of 2005 I left again for Canada. After a short stint with the Globe and Mail covering mostly Indian Affairs in the north, I bought a small ranch in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia with my girlfriend Kristin.

We are now offering all those good things that I have missed out on in life - fly-fishing, tours in the mountains, wildlife-watching. If you'd like to check out our new endeavour, go to www.GrizzlyBearRanch.ca.

I hope any of you reading find this website interesting, even inspiring. It is the pick of more than a decade's work and some of the material has never before been published. We live in a nuanced world where some wars are just, others are not and many are somewhere in between. I hope to convey some of that ambiguity.