Fox worked as a journalist and broadcaster since 1967. He was a reporter and correspondent for the BBC from 1968 to 1987. He reported on the Falklands conflict in 1982, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland. He was the chief foreign correspondent and defense analyst for the Daily Telegraph in 1987. He reported from Afghanistan, the Balkans, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East, covering the Palestinian intifada. He had been a commentator for the Italian journal Corriere della Sera in 1976. In 1982, he wrote Eyewitness Falklands, his analysis of the conflict between Britain and Argentina. His other works include Camera in Conflict (1995) on the impact and role of photojournalism in military conflicts, and War and Truth: Reporting and History.

Fox examined the Mediterranean mosaic of peoples and cultures and societies in what is a history, travelogue, and journalist’s notebook. He analyzed the crime syndicates in Italy, tribal conflicts, culture clashes along the Nile Delta in Egypt, the population explosion in the Moghreb, clan organizations and the development of radical religious groups and movements. He also addressed the issue of pollution and the threat that tourism poses to the fragile ecosystem of the region.  He noted the impact of pollution: "The most conspicuous inanimate victim is the Parthenon, bandaged in scaffolding against the mordant smog."

Fox begins his odyssey in Spain: Andalusia, Toledo, Barcelona, and Majorca. He assessed the cultural revival of the Catalonia region of Spain. He then travels to Narbonne and the Languedoc-Roussillon region of France, then to Marseille and Corsica. In Provence, he noted how the past endured in the present. From there he visits the northern Italian cities of Milan, Genoa, Venice, and finally, to Naples. He then moved to the Mezzogiorno, the south, to Calabria and finally to Sicily and Sardinia. In Italy, he analyzed the endemic political corruption and organized crime syndicates.

Fox traveled to Yugoslavia and the Adriatic coast in the 1980s when the Yugoslav federation became politically and economically unstable. He reported from Yugoslavia at the time of the breakup which began in 1991 and provided eyewitness accounts of the beginning of the civil war in Croatia. He visited first Veneto and Trieste and described the population displacements there following World War II when a shooting war between Yugoslavia and the US was narrowly averted. He then reported from Albania.

While in Greece, he went to Athens, Metsovo, Salonika, and Athos and reported from the islands of Cephalonia and Crete. In Turkey, which he regards as the “crossroads to Asia”, and “a regional strong man”, he traveled to Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir. Finally, he went to the divided island of Cyprus, with its Turkish north and Greek south.

He traveled to the Moghreb, northern Africa, reporting from Libya, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. He concluded his Mediterranean odyssey in the Levant, with visits to Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, and Israel. After stops in Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus, his final destination was Jerusalem.

Throughout his sojourn he analyzed the factionalism, whether ethnic, religious, or criminal, endemic to the Mediterranean. He was able to provide eyewitness accounts of the civil wars in the Balkans and the emergence of radical Islam in Algeria.

Fox, a historian with a degree from Oxford, is skeptical and critical in his analysis. He was an eyewitness to the gradual disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1980s, following the death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980: “During my winter journey of February 1985, I was witnessing the dying gasps of Tito’s Yugoslavia.” As a historian, Fox examined the factors that resulted in the collapse of Yugoslavia with objectivity and balance, avoiding the accepted government-handout version of the pack journalist and media hack that was all too common during the conflicts in the Balkans. He saw the breakup of Yugoslavia as the inexorable and ineluctable result of failed policies promulgated during the Communist regime of Tito: “Tito’s program…moving peoples, and altering internal borders was to have a high cost…for it was to seed the war to come.”  Fox correctly ascribed the reason for the collapse, not to “Serbian nationalism” and “Greater Serbia”, misleading propaganda constructs of the US government and media, but as due to the “militant nationalism “ which was “already burgeoning, among Slovenes in the north, Macedonians in the south, Croats, and even the Bosnian Muslims.” In other words, there was a spontaneous resurgence of nationalism that began in all the republics and regions of Yugoslavia. He termed the Yugoslav conflict as “the Yugoslav vendetta”.

He correctly saw Albanian separatism as the cause of the Kosovo conflict.  The Communist regime of Tito had been unable to solve the “nationalities” problem. Kosovo was a problem that was only bottled up, waiting to explode. Fox saw this. The reason was due to Albanian separatism fueled by demographics and the goal of the Albanian population to take over and to control the Kosovo-Metohija region of Serbia.

The Communist federation created by Tito was gradually unraveling. With the collapse of the Cold War, Yugoslavia too collapsed with it. This is how he described the conflicts that led to the break-up of Yugoslavia: “The type of war is very old, almost primeval, for it involves the vendetta of tribes and peoples as much as the battle of nations and states….Yugoslavia has been torn apart by ethnic conflict, in which different peoples have taken arms to separate themselves and establish identity and security.” He described the conflicts as a “war of peoples, rather than of nations and states” and he concluded that international organizations designed “to keep the peace” in these types of conflicts as “peculiarly impotent”. The Balkan conflicts represent the breakdown of the “modern secular nation-state” and highlight the instability of the entire Mediterranean region. Fox proffers a novel analysis of the Yugoslav breakup---dispassionate, objective, clinical, and unbiased.

Fox witnessed the beginning of the civil war in Croatia in Tenja and Borovo Selo: “The trouble had started during a Croatian police raid to round up ‘trouble makers’”. He pointed out how the news reports were distorted and even falsified by all sides to justify their actions and policies. He concluded that reports of atrocities were manipulated and distorted. There were victims on all sides: “Reports of atrocities in the war of Yugoslavia’s dissolution have been depressingly frequent. Their victims have come from all sides.”

Fox penned “Albanians and Afghans fight for the heirs to Bosnia's SS past” published in Daily Telegraph.

Fox gets to the heart of the matter immediately. For good or ill, the Nazi-fascist genocidal Ustasha regime of Ante Pavelic during World War II was the backdrop to the civil war that erupted in Croatia in 1990-1991. He described the revival of Nazi/fascist Ustasha symbols in secessionist Croatia, then backed by a resurgent and reunited Germany: “Increasingly Croat national forces, regular and irregular, have displayed the capital ‘U’ badge.” This revival of militant Nazism and fascism was carefully and meticulously covered-up in the mainstream US and Western media. It was very carefully controlled in the US. Fox cuts through the US propaganda constructs and infowar paradigms. Fox noted that Franjo Tudjman was a rabid ultra-nationalist “whose nationalist writings landed him in prison.” He gave a good account of Jasenovac and the Ustasha movement, describing how two Roman Catholic primates, Ivan Saric of Sarajevo and Alojzije Stepinac of Zagreb, endorsed the Nazi Ustasha regime and their genocidal policies against Orthodox Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies during World War II. The civil war in Croatia could not be understood without this World War II history. It was censored and suppressed, however, in the US and the West.

He dispassionately analyzed what motivated the Serbs, their “psychology of betrayal” under the Communist regime, how their enemies had mischaracterized the conflict. His analysis is unique in that he attempts to see the conflict from the Serbian perspective and to empathize with them. How would you respond if your government revived Nazi/fascist symbols and sought to finish the job that Adolf Hitler and Ante Pavelic started? He is alone in even attempting to see the conflict from a Serbian point of view. It is rather daring and a rejection of the mindless pack journalism then the vogue in “the free world”. One thing is certain. Fox is no advocacy journalist, no media prostitute and hack for the US State Department and the corporate sponsors who control all the media outlets in the US and the West. For this reason alone, this book is a must read.

Fox was a reporter during the breakup and subsequent civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, covering the civil war in Bosnia. One of his most famous and important reports is the story from Fojnica, in central Bosnia from 1993, when he reported that the Bosnian Muslim “government” and army had reformed the World War II Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division Handzar. The article was entitled “Albanians and Afghans fight for the heirs to Bosnia's SS past”, which appeared in the Daily Telegraph, on December 29, 1993, and later in the Toronto Star, but was censored and suppressed in the US media. Here is an excerpt from the article:

“Up to 6000-strong, the Handzar division glories in a fascist culture. They see themselves as the heirs of the SS Handzar division, formed by Bosnian Muslims in 1943 to fight for the Nazis. Their spiritual model was Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who sided with Hitler.

According to UN officers, surprisingly few of those in charge of the Handzars in Fojnica seem to speak good Serbo-Croatian. "Many of them are Albanian, whether from Kosovo (the Serb province where Albanians are the majority) or from Albania itself."

They are trained and led by veterans from Afghanistan and Pakistan, say UN sources. The strong presence of native Albanians is an ominous sign. It could mean the seeds of war are spreading south via Kosovo and into Albania, thence to the Albanians of Macedonia.”

This was a remarkable news account that went against the advocacy journalism and government-controlled reports of the Western mainstream media at that time. The report was remarkable because it exposed the falsity and untruthfulness of the Holocaust propaganda paradigm peddled in Bosnia by the US mainstream media. Fox was skeptical and suspicious of the mainstream media gleichschaltung or infowar techniques of the US government.

Needless to say, Fox’s report was completely censored in the US and Western media. The news story was published but through the propaganda technique of emphasis it was allowed to die on the vine. There was no follow-up and no comment. It was as if it never occurred. Fox, a defense analyst, was able to accurately predict, in 1993, that there would be a future conflict in Kosovo and in Macedonia. He was 100% accurate in his analysis and prognosis. He even predicted the Albanian terrorist insurgency in Macedonia that occurred in 2001. He understood that the presence of “Kosovar” Albanian Muslims in the 1993 reformed Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division Handzar meant that the Greater Albania ideology sponsored by Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler was not dead. It just needed a new sponsor. Not surprisingly, no one heeded Fox’s analysis.

Fox applied an objective and unbiased perspective to his reporting throughout his Mediterranean odyssey. Fox pointed out that “statistics … can be dangerous things” because “they often respond to the demands of their paymaster.” In the Mediterranean, “truth becomes a scarce commodity, like water in the desert. It becomes flexible and stretches to meet local demand. It is leavened by rumour, gossip, myth, tales and romance.”  As a historian himself, Fox has none of the shameless and mindless illusions and delusions of the journalist. Fox knows better. He resists any lapse into journalistic mindlessness, realizing instead that objectivity and balance are crucial to the historian, indeed, to sanity itself. For this reason alone, his judgments and impressions are never trite or superficial. His musings and thoughts spoken out loud are always worthwhile and meaningful because they are never politically correct or government-fed tautologies and truisms.

Fox discussed the dichotomy between history and journalism. Good journalism is usually bad history. Sensationalism and distortion and lies sell newspapers. Tabloids thrive on them. The US and Western media use them as a cheap and disgusting way to get ratings. This is what motivates CNN. Fox pointed out the subjective nature of all such reportage. He emphasized that it was “my interpretation” and that “it is a piece of journalism”. He alluded to the practice of medieval chroniclers who used the term “si dice”---“they say that”--- when describing events.

He pointed out that the Mediterranean has a complex history that cannot be simplified or reduced: “The Mediterranean is an untidy place with an untidy past.” He focused on “the diversity” of the region in describing his as “a fragmented journey”. Beginning in 1984, he was able to visit every Mediterranean country and the islands along his way. His approach is admittedly anecdotal and impressionistic. He admits that overarching generalizations are not possible: “The Mediterranean is an untidy concept”. He focused, like medieval chronicles, on personalities, events and places, which were the subject of the book. Fox noted that history as a discipline in the Western world began in the Mediterranean with Herodotus.

But what is history? Is it just the writing down of anecdotes? Is all of history merely the telling of lies and myths? Is history merely journalism? This is the question Fox asks: “The recording of anecdotes as evidence began there with Herodotus, the father of history, lies, or journalism, according to taste.” The modern Mediterranean is “seriously underestimated by modern Europe” according to Fox. This region is not given serious attention and analysis. It is regarded as an undeveloped backwater. Few have attempted to analyze the region as a whole because “so fragmented is the human mosaic” in the Mediterranean.

Can the Mediterranean region be delineated and conceptualized as a whole or unity? Fox delineates the region as stretching from the Straits of Gibraltar from the Atlantic Ocean in the West to Jerusalem in the east, an expanse of 2,250 miles.

The Mediterranean has been settled by disparate peoples through migration and assimilation: "Like the plants, almost none of the human tribes of the Inner Sea is a native of its present dwelling place -- they almost all appear to have hailed from somewhere else, Dorian Greeks, Albanians, Arabs, Turks, Spaniards and Berbers. The metaphor of the Mediterranean mixture is Macedonia, a place where peoples mixed. The Italian and French words for a fruit salad are 'macedonia' and 'macedoine.' Most successful of the early Mediterranean colonizers were the Phoenicians, who worked by absorption and merger as much as military conquest. They became so integrated with the Etruscans seven centuries before Christ that the art and craftsmanship of the two peoples of that era are all but indistinguishable."

Fox brings up a crucial and salient point about the region. Many of the national borders are arbitrarily drawn by colonial and imperialist powers. Many of the states or nations are unstable or artificial constructs: “The boundaries and frontiers between peoples are not as neat and distinct as might be suggested by the lines on maps devised by the architects of peace conferences and congresses.”

The Mediterranean can also be defined by the flora, which, like the people, was mostly transplanted there from other places. The distinctive Mediterranean flora, the “purple-flowered bougainvillea”, the eucalyptus, gum, and the tomato, were all brought there from someplace else.

The Mediterranean region has experienced a demographic explosion which has resulted in a massive influx of peoples into Northern Europe. By 2025, the populations of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, in the central Moghreb, are projected to exceed 100 million. Cairo and Istanbul are projected to have populations of 20 million.

Fox sees repercussions for Europe from the growth and development of the Mediterranean region: "With the movement of peoples from the southern shores into the north, and the need for their work and skills there, the Mediterranean is now becoming an integral part of Europe itself. No longer can it be dismissed as Europe's inconvenient annex, part of the precarious passage to India, or the sun patio for occasional and casual use by northern hedonists and tourists. The new Mediterraneans and Mediterranean ways are firmly with us."

As a consequence, as more and more people from the Mediterranean settle in northern Europe, the north is gradually becoming “Mediterraneanised”.

Fox sees the impact of pollution and tourism as detrimental to the future of the Mediterranean. With population growth and rapid industrialization, the Mediterranean is slowly becoming polluted and contaminated. Moreover, the fragile ecosystem is endangered. The booming tourist industry has endangered wildlife in the region. Fox noted how the loggerhead turtle and the mink seal were endangered because their nesting grounds had to be destroyed to make room for tourist hotels on the Greek Island of Zakinthos and on Dalyan on the Aegean Coast of Turkey.

The major conclusion that Fox makes about the Mediterranean is that the people of this region have never accepted the modern nation-state or a centralized industrial city with the thoroughness seen in northern and western Europe and the US and Canada. This is the generalization or universal attitude that Fox found among all of the peoples of the Mediterranean: “Loyalty to the family, the clan and the community comes above any abstract notion of public duty or service to the state.” For the people of the Mediterranean, the family functions as “a private support system” that is no longer seen in northern Europe. Fox noted that in Naples, a private barter economy was created through "l'arte d'arrangiarsi", the art of arranging things.

The fragility of the modern nation-state and of modernity in general is a salient conclusion. With the collapse of the Cold War with its rigid ideologies and simplistic Manichean world-view or weltanschauung, the Mediterranean has returned to a tribalism and the primitive ideologies of clannishness, an allegiance to the tribe, the clan, the totem, to atomization and Balkanization. Religion has replaced political ideologies and nationalism in many countries of the region as allegiances have shifted and been aligned to more traditional axes.

Moreover, public duty and service to the state are secondary and abstract notions in the Mediterranean. The family and the community are the core or foundation around which everything is rooted. Fox cited the example of the Mafia and the code of omerta in Italy as examples of this trait. The Mafia is a perfect microcosm of traditional Mediterranean society based on a “parallel power” based around organized crime. Fox sees the virulence and power of customs and traditions. Society has become less unified and more fragmented, a collection of cultures and communities more like a mosaic.

With the collapse of the Cold War, and the concomitant collapse of a rigid Manichean ideological certainty, a reversion has occurred with an allegiance based on religion, on clan, on culture, on ethnicity, on tribe, on community. It is atavistic. It is a return to a more basic orientation and a decrease in a commitment to the trappings of “modernity” or Westernized “civilization” and “culture”. It has seen a return to the clan, to the community, ethnic or religious, to Islam, or to Judaism, or to Christianity, as the sources of meaning and identity. This breakdown has resulted in the civil wars and conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, in Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Kosovo, and Algeria.

The Mediterranean shows just how thin is the veneer of “civilization” and “modernity” and just how fragile is the modern nation-state and nationalism. The nation-state and national identity are fleeting and transitory and ever-changing like a kaleidoscope. When they fail, there is a reversion to more primal or elementary sources of identity and meaning, such as culture, family, community, ethnicity, tribal identity, religion, and language.

This is a highly recommended book that demonstrates the complexities and uncertainties of history and of nations and the lack of easy answers in a time of rapid change.