IN a story, quoted by Milan Kundera, the son of a Member of Parliament, heard the following on the news : "The plane crash over the Atlantic claimed one hundred and twenty-nine lives including seven children and four journalists." We have long become used to the idea that in such reports children tend to be singled out as a special, exceptionally valuable type of humanity. But on this occasion the announcer included journalists among them, and the son of the MP suddenly saw the light.He saw that in our time most politicians cut a ridiculous figure. He decided to become a jouralist. At one time journalistic fame was symbolised by the great name of Ernest Hemingway. His whole work, his concise matter of fact style, was rooted in his dispatches to the Kansas City newspapers as a young man. Ernest Hemingway imagined himself, as all his admirers now do, a heavyweight, a literary hard puncher and even physically a formidable opponent. He valued the attributes that the American male holds close to his heart : personal courage, physical and moral. Hemingway spoke of the discipline needed for writing as similar to that for successful boxing. Daniel Defoe, who had careers as a businessman, soldier, journalist and spy, towards the end of his life sat down to write a book he hoped would clear him of debt. In is first novel, perhaps the first real novel in English, he gave shape to the oldest dream of Western man, he created a castaway Adam and marooned him in Eden. It seems as natural for the journalist to dream of the exotic as to dream at all. Man is born with the impulse to wonder and eventually to yearn for the world before the fall. But to us the