Please ask our friendly bartender to mix you up a free gin & tonic or a whisky & ginger ale. The offer is available from 6:00-8.00 PM but both members and their guests are welcome to stay in the clubroom after the offer ends, the bar will remain open until late.

All members are welcome. We hope you enjoy your evening at the Club.

Based on new archive research and original interviews with leading correspondents and diplomats, the book explores why this fiercely contested region exerts such a pull over reporters: those who bring the story to the world. Despite decades of diplomacy, a just and lasting end to the conflict remains as difficult as ever to achieve.

Lyse Doucet, Chief International Correspondent at BBC News, said: “At a time when reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is under unprecedented scrutiny, James Rodgers provides an essential and insightful historical perspective on the long “war of words” behind a major conflict of our time. Rodgers’ book is essential reading for those seeking a greater understanding of the difficult dynamics behind reporting – and resolving conflicts.”

James Rodgers is an author and journalist. His previous books are Reporting Conflict (2012) and No Road Home: Fighting for Land and Faith in Gaza (2013). A former BBC correspondent in Moscow, Brussels, and Gaza, James lectures in Journalism at City University.

Guests are encouraged to read the book before the event, although you are also welcome to join if you’ve just started your exploration. Previous experience has shown that members often gain insight and inspiration from discussions with the author, which enable them to continue reading the book in a new light.

This will be an in-depth discussion rather than a standard format Q&A. The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, following by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM. We will get to know one another over starters before the introduction of the evening’s guest author.

The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and founding member and senior correspondent at The Guardian and The Observer, Ed Vulliamy.

SPECIAL DISCOUNT FOR THE FRONTLINE CLUB: Save 30% when ordering on palgrave.com. Please e-mail Sophie Kayes for the code. Valid until 31 October 2015. Terms and conditions apply.

Menu £25 per person excluding drinks. 

The idea behind members’ BookNights is to have a thoroughly good time, encourage reading and discussion, and to end the night both happier and wiser than when it began. For more information about membership and the other benefits on offer, please contact membership coordinator Sophie Kayes.

For June’s BookNight we are pleased to welcome author and special advisor at Human Rights Watch Fred Abrahams, who will present his book Modern Albania From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe over an intimate dinner with Frontline Club members. You can now order Modern Albania with a 20% discount. Please use this code to claim your discount: CSF615MALB.

Modern Albania offers a vivid history of the fall of the Albanian Communist regime and the trials and tribulations that led the country to become the state it is today. The book provides an in-depth look at the Communists’ final Politburo meetings and the first student revolts; the fall of the Stalinist regime and the war in neighbouring Kosovo; and the relationship between Albania and the United States. A rich, narrative-driven account, Modern Albania gives readers a front-row seat to the dramatic events of the last battle of Cold War Europe.

Fred Abrahams is a writer who has worked for twenty years in areas marred by political crises and armed conflict, including the Balkans and the Middle East. In Modern Albania, he weaves together interviews with key Albanians and international parties who have played a role in the country’s politics since 1990.

Guests will be expected to have read the book, and to be ready and willing to contribute to the conversation. This will be an in-depth discussion rather than a standard format Q&A. The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, following by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM. We will get to know one another over starters before the introduction of the evening’s guest author.

The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and founding member and senior correspondent at The Guardian and The Observer, Ed Vulliamy.

Menu £25 per person excluding drinks

After an inspiring discussion with Robert McCrum on his list of the 100 greatest novels of all time composed for The Observer, we remain in the literary gear and welcome the acclaimed playwright, poet, and librettist Dan O’Brien.

During the evening, Dan will give a reading from his book of poems War Reporter, as well as talking about his critically acclaimed play The Body of an American, which was derived from the same material.

The collection of poems focuses on the photojournalist Paul Watson. Paul won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1993 photograph of a dead American being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Deriving from correspondence between poet and photojournalist, from transcripts, Watson’s own memoir, and their eventual meeting on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, these poems bear unsparing witness to the incalculable damage inflicted by contemporary warfare.

‘War Reporter is an edgy, heartbreaking amalgam of memoir, dramatic monologue and poetic intensity, in which war reporter Paul Watson’s complex personal struggles are seen against the backdrop of political violence.’
– Alan Shapiro

‘A masterpiece of truthfulness and feeling, and a completely sui generis addition not just to writing about war but to contemporary poetry’
– Patrick McGuinness, Guardian

War Reporter won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2013 and was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize 2013, while The Body of an American won the prestigious Horton Foote Prize in New York in September 2014.

The format for the night will be as tried and tested: drinks from 7:00 PM, dinner at 7:30 PM – getting to know one another over starters before I cue our guest. After Dan‘s readings the discussion begins over the main course. Same ethos as usual: this is not a “book club”, more a 19th century salon after which people leave merrier, better-fed and wiser than when they arrived, having hopefully made new acquaintances, friends, lovers, who knows.

We do intend to keep the dinner intimate and places are going fast, so please book now.

Very best wishes, see you there –

Ed Vulliamy & Pranvera Smith 
Frontline Club BookNights

Menu £25 per person excluding drink

On Monday 15 September, the Clubroom hosted another fascinating night of discussion following the presentation of Patrick Cockburn’s new book, Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising.

It was a popular event and those lucky few who booked their tickets left the night, as promised by our exceptional chair Ed Vulliamy, merrier and wiser.

The next BookNight coming up in October will present Robert McCrum and his compilation of the hundred greatest novels of all time. The books “choose themselves”, says Robert, but how fascinating it will be to hear how he chooses novels that choose themselves; what gets left out, how the public reacts – and we round the table, indeed – to his selection. Here’s the list so far.

Robert is a former editor-in-chief at Faber and Faber (during crucial years, 1980–96, pioneering and championing the new fiction of Milan Kundera, Paul Austin, Peter Carey and illustrious others – plus the poetry of Seamus Heaney) and now über-literary-editor of The Observer and The Guardian.

Please watch this space,

The Frontline BookNight Team

The idea behind members’ BookNights is to have a thoroughly good time, encourage reading and discussion of reading, and to end the night happier and wiser than when it began. For more information about membership and the other benefits on offer, please contact Membership Coordinator, Sophie Kayes.

Following the success of our BookNights with Carlotta Gall, Tim Butcher and Nick Davies, it is our honour to announce the forthcoming dinner.

On Monday 15 September, we welcome Patrick Cockburn, who will – with striking topicality – talk about his new book, The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising. Patrick needs no introduction to Frontline members, who in turn do not need persuading of the fact that he is alone and unique in the depth of his knowledge and experience in Iraq. Where many of us have roamed – Bosnia here, Iraq there, Afghanistan and wherever – Patrick has ploughed his furrow since before the West’s first Iraq adventure in 1991, breaking only to write a poignantly powerful and intimate book with his son. The Jihadis Return is a bit like a packed-explosive IED itself: small and super-charged.

While the West remains torn between belligerence and war-weariness in Iraq, ISIS marches on; and as the crisis deepens, there is no one who can inform us better than Patrick, from the ground he has trodden for 25 years, on the options and lack of them. Here, while you wait for your copy of the book to arrive, are his latest thoughts, in the wake of the execution of our colleague James Foley.

The format for the night will be as tried and tested: drinks from 7:00 PM, dinner at 7:30 PM – getting to know one another over starters before the introduction of the evening’s guest author. Patrick will then speak a while, after which the discussion begins. Carlotta Gall and Tim Butcher needed no ‘chairing’, but the discourse with Nick Davies needed, perhaps, a tighter rein. We’ll gauge that as we go. Same ethos as usual: this is NOT a “book club”, more a 19th century salon after which people leave drunker, better-fed and wiser than when they arrived, having hopefully made new acquaintances, friends, lovers, who knows.

Very best wishes, see you there –

Ed Vulliamy

Frontline Club BookNights

Menu £25 per person excluding drinks

Starters
Smoked Mackerel fillet with beetroot & horseradish cream
Pork belly salad with caramelised apple & dandelion
Pea & watercress soup
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Main Courses
Roast rump of Norfolk Lamb with courgette, mash & black olive jus
Wild sea trout with linguine & lobster bisque
Pumpkin & chickpea tagine with couscous & minted yogurt
****
Desserts
Raspberry & blackcurrant parfait
Dark chocolate & salted caramel tart with creme fraiche
Lemon posset with shortbread

Following the success of our BookNight with Tim Butcher, beyond even our highest hopes, we now welcome Nick Davies, for our August event.

Nick has just published Hack Attack: How The Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch, a full and startling amassment of his revelatory work for the Guardian – and more – on phone-hacking, phone-hackers and rot at the heart of British power.

It is of course a book about the entourage of an old-Etonian Prime Minister who sports his poppy on Remembrance Day while his trusted friend and cabinet appointee bugs the phones of the dead soldiers families. So it becomes also a book about all that entails: a parable about the people who rule us, and the media which infest our lives. The fetid corruption of the very fabric of British power and society.

The emerging customs will prevail: drinks at 19h00, dinner from 19h30, and we’ll get to know each other during a starter course. I’ll introduce Nick before we start the main meal in every sense, and he’ll say a few words. After which we hold a discussion – NOT a ‘Q&A’ – and, as is the premise of these gatherings, hope to leave a little drunker and a lot wiser than when we arrived.

Guests will be expected to have read the book in order to contribute to the discussion.

Very best wishes, see you there – –

Ed Vulliamy

Frontline Club BookNights

Menu £25 per person excluding drinks

Starters
Rabbit & chorizo terrine with granary toast
Smoked salmon with white crab meat & crème fraiche
Pea & watercress soup
****
Main Courses
Roast rump of Norfolk Lamb with courgette, mash & black olive jus
Roast cod, violet artichokes, red peppers & basil
Pumpkin & chickpea tagine with couscous & minted yogurt
****
Desserts
Lemon & blueberry cheesecake
Dark chocolate & salted caramel tart
Eton Mess 

For the second of our Members’ BookNights we welcome the esteemed Tim Butcher. Shortly after the centennial of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, he will be talking about his book The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War.

Tim will present his book over an intimate dinner in the Clubroom – numbers up to about 16. The meal will cost £25 per head (see menu below) excluding drinks. Guests will be expected to have read the book, ready and willing to contribute to the discussion. This will not be a standard format of a ‘Q&A’, as in the forum upstairs.

The idea is to have a thoroughly good time, encourage reading and discussion of reading, and to end the night happier and wiser than when it began. The notion is further to harvest and focus some of the best ways in which the club has developed over its decade of existence, but also to recapture some of the atmosphere of the ‘old days’ of its outset.

Menu £25 per person excluding drinks

Heritage beetroot, endive, orange & Wallop goats cheese
Spiced sweetcorn soup

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Wild mushroom, leek & tarragon pie with spinach
Roast chicken with garlic mash, peas & bacon

****

Lemon cheesecake
Apple & almond tart with honey clotted cream