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Toby Harnden

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Toby Harnden (born 1966) is a United States-based British journalist and author.

Since October 2006, he has been the U.S. editor for London's The Daily Telegraph. He was previously Chief Foreign Correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph, reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Bahrain, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Austria, Italy, Estonia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the United States and Thailand.

He is from Manchester and took his degree at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, being awarded a First in Modern History in 1988 as well as being president of the Junior Common Room (JCR). After nearly 10 years as an officer in the Royal Navy, he became a journalist, beginning his new career initially as a theatre reviewer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and an obituaries writer. [citation needed]

As well as the Telegraph titles, he has worked for the Leith Leader, The Scotsman, Western Morning News (Plymouth, England) and The Independent. He has had articles published in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Sun, The Spectator, The Evening Standard, The Literary Review, Naval Review, East End Life, The Sunday Business Post (Dublin), The Daily Star (Beirut) and the Conde Nast Traveller.

He has been married since 2006 to Cheryl Bosse; they live in northern Virginia.

From 1999 to 2003, he was the Daily Telegraph's Washington Bureau Chief. During two stints in the United States, he has reported from 48 out of 50 states, writing about American politics, US foreign policy and various aspects of American society. He was in Washington, D.C. on 9/11. [citation needed]

He joined the Daily Telegraph in 1994 as a home news reporter before being posted to Belfast as the newspaper's Ireland Correspondent in 1996. He subsequently covered the Good Friday Agreement and the Omagh bombing of 1998 as well as numerous explosions, ceasefires, shootings, riots, marches and political crises. The culmination of his work in Northern Ireland was the publication of Bandit Country: The IRA & South Armagh (Hodder & Stoughton 1999), which has sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide.

Before joining The Sunday Telegraph in January 2005, he was Middle East Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. He was based in Jerusalem but travelled extensively throughout the region and spent much of 2004 covering the war in Iraq. He was a "unilateral" reporter during the battle of Najaf in August 2004 and three months later was embedded with the US Army's Task Force 2-2 during the battle of Fallujah.

In May 2005, he was imprisoned in Zimbabwe for 14 days after being arrested at a rural polling station on the day of the country's parliamentary elections and deported following acquittal on a charge of "practicing journalism without accreditation".

He writes a regular blog at Harnden blog.

Works

  • Bandit Country -The IRA and South Armagh, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1999. ISBN 0-340-71736-X