BBC Correspondent Kate Adie has spent a lifetime reporting international conflict, but told Kingston University students on Monday night, “I don’t do a dangerous job”.

The reporter, who has broadcast from warzones in Iraq, Bosnia and Rwanda, said she has often had to prove her interviewers wrong.

“They’d say ‘Oh! You do such a dangerous job. Why do that?’ And I think, ‘I don’t’.”

She added: “I suppose if you’ve been to places like Sierra Leone, you’ve been to war in Chad, you’ve been to war in Yugoslavia, you’ve been to revolutions, assassinations, murders and a great deal of fire, flood, pestilence and everything else, people tend to assume that life hasn’t been entirely a holiday.”

"...if you’ve been to places like Sierra Leone, you’ve been to war in Chad, you’ve been to war in Yugoslavia... people tend to assume that life hasn’t been entirely a holiday."

Truly dangerous jobs, she suggests in her new book Into Danger: People Who Risk Their Lives for Work, are far less celebrated.

Ms Adie continued: “The most dangerous job in any country in the world, for women, is prostitution. More prostitutes get killed worldwide than women do in any other job.”

“I went to Rwanda for this book and I went to look at mine clearance which is another dangerous job. If you want to know what the danger is like, get trapped in a minefield. It  has happened to me twice, in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and is a terrifying feeling. They do say you hear the little ‘click’ a quarter of a second before it blows your limbs off.”

She did, however, admit her profession comes with some inherent danger, and that staying calm under pressure had ensured her continued survival.

Ms Adie has been shot whilst working - which she said feels like “standing in front of the Newcastle to London express train and not getting out of the way”.

Her hearing, which was slightly impaired at birth, has also suffered. Encouraging one student to address her more loudly, she explained that, “a lifetime spent in places like Beirut and Chechnya hasn’t improved things terrifically”.

 However she added: “It’s become fashionable to think that journalists are a bunch of adrenaline junkies who go off their heads. They’re no more adrenaline junkies than anyone else. If they are and they go to battlezones they die fast. You have to be careful in warzones.”