A number of journalists who declined to accept embedded status rapidly ended up dead, victims either of friendly fire or of inexplicable accidents. There are those who find the casualty list in question sinister, and it is not hard to see why.

In an age of wholesale media manipulation, the provocatively personal war reporting of Robert Fisk seems more remarkable — and more vital — than ever. The most doggedly un-embedded of correspondents, Fisk makes no secret of his contempt for US foreign policy, but however partisan, his journalism furiously proclaims his honesty and humanity, his diehard refusal to be fobbed off with official versions of events.

Like war itself, war reporting has long been a British speciality, and Fisk has had many distinguished predecessors. One of the most distinguished of them all is the subject of an extraordinarily topical new book.

Just published in Britain (to much critical acclaim), Telegram from Guernica by the writer and World Service broadcaster Nicholas Rankin tells the story of George Steer (1909-1944), the British journalist who filed the report which inspired Picasso to produce the most celebrated anti-war painting in the history of art.

Steer considered war to be the “highest form of inefficiency” known to man. Yet — like so many war reporters — he seems to have found the business of monitoring military conflicts more or less irresistible. During his brief, hyperactive, wordmongering career (he was a mere 35 when he died), Steer dashed from war zone to war zone, evidently bored to distraction by civilian life.

Steer learned Latin and Greek at those academic bastions of the British establishment, Winchester and Oxford, but his early years were passed in South Africa. Far removed from Oxford snobs like his literary contemporary Evelyn Waugh, this clever, intense, colonial Englishman was a romantic leftist, instinctively sympathetic to victims of imperial aggression. In Ethiopia in the early 1930s, he made himself known to Emperor Haile Selassie and went on to pen brilliant dispatches for the Times about the savage war of conquest which the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini waged against the Abyssinian emperor and his people. Steer observed gruesome atrocities: The use by the Italian Air Force of “yperite,” otherwise known as mustard gas, against more or less helpless Abyssinians and the bombing of Red Cross ambulances and hospitals.

As Rankin remarks, the Italo-Abyssinian War was nothing less than the original “laboratory of airpower,” and Steer was only too conscious that he was witnessing the birth of a terrible new era in the history of warfare — an era which has led inexorably to the present US strategy of “shock and awe.”

In Spain — where he championed the cause of the Basques — Steer carried on chronicling modern man’s technologically enhanced capacity for barbarous behavior. On April 26, 1937, the 27-year-old war reporter saw the horrifying aftermath of the devastation of Guernica. On that day, the German Condor Legion, exploiting monstrous new incendiary devices, fire-bombed this blameless Basque settlement; it was the first instance of the deliberate bombing of civilians. Published in both the London Times and the New York Times, with the headline “The Tragedy of Guernica, Town destroyed in Air Attack,” Steer’s dispatch demonstrated the potency of well-crafted words: Not only did it vividly evoke the horror of Guernica, it also exposed the collusion of the Nazis with the Spanish fascists led by Gen. Franco and exploded Franco’s cynical claim that the Basques themselves were responsible for reducing Guernica to ashes. Years later a historian was to describe the piece as the “basic document in establishing world opinion about the destruction of Guernica.”

With the advent of World War II, the patriotic Steer was in no doubt whose side he was on in the struggle to defeat fascism. Nothing if not enterprising, he played a key part in the propaganda war against the Japanese in Burma, becoming one of the architects of “psy-ops.” The (15th) UK Psyops Group — which survives to this day and which is indeed operating in Iraq at the present time — was in some measure Steer’s creation. It is ironic that this obdurately independent reporter helped to pioneer the “hearts and minds” approach to warfare which has spawned the phenomenon of the embedded journalist. But there is nothing in Steer’s story to indicate that he would have been anything other than appalled by the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The current crisis in the Middle East would almost certainly have found him out on the streets of Baghdad, fearlessly bearing witness to the chaos and gratuitous human suffering that has been unleashed by the exponents of “shock and awe.”

Steer never returned from Burma. On Christmas Day 1944, he crashed his jeep, shattering his skull and dying instantly. He left behind his second wife, two small children, endless scattered articles and no fewer than five books, which have much to say about the dark heart of modern civilization.

Likewise of colonial background, likewise an alumnus of Oxford, likewise a romantic man of letters, Nicholas Rankin has found the perfect subject. As fervent as it is informative, his biography of George Steer is an absorbing feat of literary empathy.