Ben Brown is one of the BBC’s most senior foreign correspondents. Listening to him talk you cannot help but be amazed at how often he has been on “the frontline of history” in the last twenty years. From Moscow during the collapse of Communism to Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe, Iraq and Libya, his travel itinerary reads like a map of the places any ordinary person would simply not want to visit.

When he arrives to speak to Peterhouse Politics Society he has touched down in England from Libya a mere 12 hours earlier. Yet he remains cautiously optimistic about the state of affairs there: “I don’t think it will be like Iraq,” he says, “Libya is not, in general, as extreme and 99.9% of people there genuinely hated Gadhafi’s guts.”

The reaction of the public to their new found liberty is remarkable, he effuses; he speaks of whole families going out night after night to celebrate, taking young children with them, simply because they can.As for the most recent development - Gadhafi’s death - he chose not to make the journey to see the body, as many others did. When a keen student asks whether he had, he delicately suggests that he thought the task distasteful and unnecessary.          

When questioned on the responsibility of journalists to remain impartial he laughs claiming that it is an impossible balancing act but that, nevertheless, impartiality is the cornerstone of all good journalism.

When embedded with the British Army in Iraq he was standing doing a piece to the camera when a man playing dead behind him stood, aimed a rocket launcher at his back and prepared to fire. Only a quick round fired into his would-be assassin’s chest prevented his death that day. Even shaking the hand of the soldier who’d just saved his life made him feel “compromised” as a journalist. “There I was shaking this soldier’s hand for killing an Iraqi man but what else could I do when he’d just saved my life?” he ponders.

The personal aspect of journalism is always there despite attempts to remain impartial: “Of course I have opinions and prejudices going into any situation. You simply can’t just separate yourself from your Western liberal heritage when going into these countries. But you have to attempt to not let it influence you.”

Interestingly, the most scared he has ever been was not in Iraq or Libya but during Mugabe’s raids on the white farms in Zimbabwe. Hiding in a white farmer’s house to film 200 drugged up, armed, hired mercenaries seize the place, they suddenly became trapped inside and were unable to leave. The fact that Mugabe had issued an order to kill any BBC journalists in the country couldn’t have helped. Only by pretending to be the farmer's family visiting from England, hiding their equipment in a wardrobe and smuggling the footage out in his underpants were they able to talk their way out.

Do these near brushes with death make him question what he does? Absolutely: “Every time you are in this situation you panic, think of your wife and children, promise God that if he only gets you out alive you’ll never do this again. And then you survive, and that makes you think you’re clever or lucky and so you do it again.”

He laughingly describes one situation when he remembers thinking, “Either I’m going to die or I’m going to get an award for this” and proudly proclaims that he did in fact get an award for that day's filming.

Bedazzled, we all laugh appreciatively at this point but I can’t help wondering at how alarmingly true that statement is. It would take a braver person than me to have his career, however much I might like to imagine that I too could come back from such a dangerous job with the ability to make an audience laugh.