In a career full of remarkable episodes, there is one incident so extraordinary, so unbelievably fortuitous, it dominates any retelling of Clare Hollingworth's life. Sixty years on, it still clings to any mention of her name in the press. Hollingworth was 27, and had been a journalist for less than a week, when she found herself in Katowice, on the Polish-German border, lodging with the British consul-general and filing reports on the worsening European security situation for the Daily Telegraph. It was one of the very last days of August 1939. The border was closed to all but diplomatic vehicles, and so Hollingworth asked if she might borrow the consular car for a fact-finding trip into Hitler's Germany. She ventured alone across the border where she bought wine, torches and as much film as she could find.

She had turned the car back towards Poland and was driving along a steep hillside near the fortified border, when she noticed that huge screens of hessian had been erected along the roadside, concealing the valley from passing traffic. As she passed, the wind caught a loose piece of tarpaulin, revealing large numbers of troops, hundreds of tanks, armoured cars and field guns, lined up and battle-ready - and facing Poland. Hollingworth had accidentally stumbled across the imminent German invasion of Poland, and in so doing had won herself one of the biggest scoops in history: the beginning of the second world war. It was the first that the consul-general, or the Foreign Office, had heard of it.

So began an extraordinary journalistic career spanning seven decades that would take her from wartime Poland and north Africa to communist China, via conflict-ravaged Palestine, Algeria, Aden and Vietnam. Just as during those first days in Poland, her career was characterised to its end by bloody-minded determination, unshakeable courage and workaholism (to the acknowledged detriment of her personal life). But she has also been blessed with an apparent - sometimes grim - gift for exceptional journalistic luck.

Hollingworth is now 92 and - to her enormous frustration - almost blind, but if her short-term memory is not what it was, and if her recollections of her early life are now distilling into a number of well-worn anecdotes, her milk-bottle spectacles cannot quite conceal the traces of the gimlet eye that served her famously sharp intellect. She has lived in Hong Kong, on and off, since the early 1980s, having ended her career as Far East correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph (though, typically, she does not consider herself retired; until very recently she was still calling the London newsdesk daily).

Her trips to Europe are fewer, but her daily visit to the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club, of which she is the undisputed doyenne, was uninterrupted until a few months ago when she broke a femur in a tumble. Friends who visit her regularly say she would like nothing better than to get back to work.

Born in 1911 in Knighton, south of Leicester, she moved to a farm outside Shepshed during the early war years when her father took on the wartime management of his father's boot and shoe factory. It was a blissful place to be young, as Hollingworth tells it, but even there, war insisted on interrupting things, prompting the first stirrings of an interest that would become a lifetime's obsession. "War was a part of history that I simply got caught up in, if you like," she says. "I remember the German bombers flying over the farm we lived in, to bomb Loughborough. And the next day we got Polly the pony and took the trap into Loughborough to see the damage they had done. And I remember, I was very surprised about how little damage there was." Her father was never a soldier, but instilled in his older daughter his fascination for battlefields, taking her to Naseby and Bosworth during school holidays, and later to Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt. "He would always explain most succinctly," she wrote later, "the battle line-up, who attacked where and why, the mistakes that were made that resulted in defeat, the reasons for the battles - that war, in fact, was and has always been an extension of politics and the ultimate result of the failure of statesmen to keep the peace."

After school she went to domestic science college in Leicester, at the insistence of her father (which taught her to hate all things domestic for the rest of her life). But the life of the country deb was not for her. With her left-of-centre politics and bookish, boyish ways, her family considered her rather strange, she says, "though I did all the right things. I got engaged to a young man I knew whose family knew mine. But I realised it wasn't my dish and after a year or so, I broke it off."

Instead, she worked as secretary to the League of Nations Union (LNU) organiser for Worcestershire, won a scholarship to the School of Slavonic Studies at London university, and later, a place to study Croatian at Zagreb university (though she admits she learned little of the language).

In 1936, aged 24, she agreed to marry Vandaleur Robinson, the LNU regional organiser in the south-east. Hollingworth had always declared her reluctance to wed because, she said, she didn't want to give up her own name, only giving in when told by a friend that she didn't need to; she became, she was told, "about the eighth woman in England" to hold a passport in her own name. But it was a match based more on mutual interests (central European politics, largely) than romantic attachment. Within two years she had taken a job in Warsaw distributing aid to the thousands of Jews, Catholics, communists and socialists who had fled Sudetenland ahead of the advancing Nazis. Robinson remained in England.

The job was to prove the perfect preparation for what was to come next. On August 25 1939, on a visit to England, Hollingworth met Arthur Watson, editor of the Daily Telegraph. He had read a few pieces she had written for the New Statesman, knew that she knew Poland well, and hired her on the spot as the paper's number two in the country, based in Katowice. She flew out early the next morning.

Hollingworth's war began with her calling the British embassy in Warsaw early on the morning of September 1 to tell them the Germans had invaded, and holding her telephone receiver out of the window when they didn't believe her. There followed a breathless dash across Poland just ahead of the German lines; in Krakow on September 3 she heard on the radio that Britain had declared war on Germany.

For some weeks she continued alone, often behind enemy lines, pursuing stories - though most of her copy from Poland never made it to her editors due to communications problems. "I was not brave," she now says. "I was not naive. I knew the dangers. But I thought it was a good thing to do and witness and see, and I was more or less relaxed. I used to stop and sleep in the car, have a biscuit and a drop of wine, and go on. In those days we said you could go anywhere with a T and T - a typewriter and a toothbrush."

After the Russians entered Poland she moved to Bucharest for much of 1940; she was working for the Daily Express, having fallen out with the Telegraph's stringer there, who she felt was "pro-German". Her marriage was effectively over: "I think I was fond of my husband," she says, "friendly with my husband, but I thought that for me - and in a different kind of way for him - my career was more important than trying to rush back home." She is adamant that at no point did any of her employers worry that she might, as a married woman, want to stay at home. "Good God, no! Oh, no. Not. At. All."

Nonetheless, her unusual and oddly ascetic personal life cemented the reputation Hollingworth had early established as a ferociously hard worker. "I suppose I felt it was my duty," she says simply. "I worked almost all the time. I reported during the day, and [wrote] books at weekends, and at nights." Did she work harder than the other correspondents? "Probably ... I mean, most of them had a girlfriend or something. I had very little private life, let's put it that way." Why? "Because I was more interested in my work than in private life, truthfully."

And so she continued in pursuit of her first love. Next came Greece, Romania again, Turkey and lastly Cairo, to which she travelled in an open-decked cargo boat from Mersin in Turkey; German planes, she recalls, flew low over it but clearly decided it was not worth sinking. She took a room at the Hotel Continental, got herself put up for the Gezira Club, where British officers and international press hung out, and loved it.

She liked and respected the British generals Wavell and Auchinleck, but she hadn't much time for Monty, because he hadn't too much time for her, believing women reporters should be kept away from the front. At the end of the desert campaign, shortly after he captured Tripoli in 1943, Montgomery ordered Hollingworth, by now working for the Chicago Daily News and shadowing him with the rest of the press pack, back to Cairo. So she went to join Eisenhower and the Americans in Algiers. "I said, I can do anything a man can do: use a man's loo, sleep on the floor." (Until recent years, she would periodically spend occasional nights on the floor, to ensure she wasn't "going soft".)

She was far from unique as a female war reporter at the time - more than 100 women, including the celebrated Martha Gellhorn, were accredited as correspondents during the war - but she would certainly have been unusual, which, in truth, suited her well. "Clare never much liked other women correspondents," says the biographer and historian Tom Pocock, who first met her while covering Algiers for the London Evening Standard in 1962 and later worked closely alongside her in Aden and India. "Clare knew a lot about the business of war, and she rather felt that the others, certainly those she talked to me about, were out to make a name by being admired for doing anything a man could do."

From her base in Cairo, Hollingworth travelled widely during the war to Palestine, Iraq and Persia (where she got the first interview with the new shah, 21-year-old Mohammed Reza Pahlevi). She got a pilot's licence - "to help me understand air warfare" - and learned to parachute jump (though it was too safe and controlled, she says, to be terribly exciting). She had a brief, apparently chaste, courtship with Christopher Buckley, the Daily Telegraph's Middle East correspondent, but the affair seems simply to have petered out.

Instead Hollingworth grew close to Geoffrey Hoare, who did the same job for the Times. They began working closely together, even filing reports on each other's behalf under each other's bylines when the occasion demanded. By 1945 they had decided to live together; shortly after the war Hollingworth's husband decided to divorce her for desertion. Her first marriage was finally dissolved in 1951; she and Hoare married a year later.

They covered the Middle East together for a while after the war, Hollingworth for the Economist and the Observer. In Jerusalem in July 1946, they were 300m from the King David hotel, the British administration's HQ, where they were staying, when it was blown up, killing 91. The Irgun leader Menachim Begin was the only man, she says, whose hand she refused to shake, even when he rose to political prominence in Israel in the 1970s. "I would not shake a hand with so much blood on it."

On a more pragmatic level, "I lost all my possessions," she recalls, "and worse, my mother changed her will because she said she wasn't going to leave her money to a daughter who was irresponsible enough to stay in a hotel that was blown up."

In 1950, Hoare was made Paris bureau chief for the News Chronicle, so Hollingworth went too, as the Manchester Guardian's number two. The following May, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess defected to the Soviet Union, to be followed two years later by Maclean's wife Melinda, and their children. In another breathtaking flash of journalistic luck, Hoare and Hollingworth had shared a back garden with the Macleans in Cairo in 1948, where they had all become intimate friends. "We knew the problems they were having," says Hollingworth. "She used to cry on our shoulders a bit. When Donald was sober he was enormously intelligent and pleasant, but of course he drank so terribly. She found it very, very difficult."

Kim Philby had been another acquaintance of Hollingworth's since the late 1930s. "Kim, though he was a friend of Donald's, was quite a different person," she says. "He was openly homosexual, openly drunk. Donald had a certain diplomatic [air]. Philby was less intelligent. Less pleasant, frankly." She and Philby were working together in Beiruit, he for the Observer, when in January 1963 he disappeared. Having been told once by Melinda Maclean that Philby was particularly intimate with her husband, Hollingworth was pretty convinced Philby was the third man. "I tried very hard to find him," she says. "When I'm on a story, I'm on a story - to hell with husband, family, anyone else. I won't rest until I get to the bottom of it."

Nor did she. After an exhaustive piece of detective work, Hollingworth discovered that on the night Philby disappeared a Soviet ship had left Beiruit for Odessa; "under harsh questioning from me", the Lebanese police admitted that a drunken Soviet sailor had been left behind, although all seamen on the ship had been accounted for before it left. She was quite certain Philby had been on the ship. She immediately filed the story for the Guardian. Three weeks later, after a trip to Iraq on another story, it had still not run. Editor Alastair Hetherington, she writes in her memoirs, told her that publication would risk an enormous libel suit.

"She was aghast that the Guardian didn't appreciate the story," says David Fairhall, then aviation correspondent, who would succeed Hollingworth as defence correspondent. "It was a great tragedy, it was one of the very great scoops." It wasn't until April 27, when she was in the London office and Hetherington was away, that she finally persuaded a deputy editor to run the piece, almost buried on page seven, under the headline: "Riddle of Philby's disappearance - Journalist missing 3 months".

The story caused a minor sensation. ("For the first time in history," the veteran journalist Trilby Ewer told her, "the Daily Express is leading with what the Guardian said yesterday.") Shortly afterwards the government admitted it believed Philby had indeed fled to Russia.

Hollingworth's time at the Guardian also coincided with the period that really made her name as a journalist: covering the Algerian war of the 50s and early 60s. She was accredited to the French army, but also cultivated close contacts among the Algerian nationalist rebels inside their stronghold in the Algiers casbah. "Clare was quite extraordinary there," says Pocock. "It was very, very harrowing indeed, there were people being killed in the streets all around you, and she had terrific contacts on the Algerian side - though she never told us. People like me were in it for the action stories; Clare was doing very, very serious journalism. She's such an old warrior. It's a curious thing about her; she actually enjoys war. She's not at all bloodthirsty, she's actually very humane and kind, but she gets a huge kick out of it.

"I remember one time when we were in India together, going up to the front line in an Indian army jeep, and we had to get over a bridge that was being shelled by the Pakistanis. Every 20 seconds there were these big shell whoomps by the bridge. The Indian army officer said, 'Let's wait for one, and then make a dash for it,' and I said, 'Oh dear, let's keep our fingers crossed,' but I remember Clare turned round, her eyes shining like a young girl at a dance, and said, 'Now this is what makes life worth living!' She was absolutely thrilled to bits."

Pocock was also present at a now notorious incident in March 1962 when the Aletti hotel was stormed by rebel Algerians hunting an Italian journalist and, failing to find him, bundled the Daily Telegraph's reporter John Wallis into the back of a jeep to be driven off to his near certain execution. "Clare turned like Joan of Arc to the rest of us standing with our hands up - 'Come on!' she said, 'We're going too! They won't shoot all the world's press!' So we all marched out and started climbing into the jeeps." The rebels let them all go.

Hollingworth's reporting from Algiers won her, in 1963, the Granada Journalist of the Year and Hannan Swaffer awards. That year she was recalled to the Guardian's London office and made defence correspondent. John Cole, later the BBC's political editor, was her news editor.

"Defence correspondent was a bit of an ambitious position at that time," he says. "She did a lot of MoD stories for me, the army getting new equipment, arguments about airforce planes, that kind of thing. But the foreign desk was still in Manchester in those days, so when she was periodically in Algeria and elsewhere she was working for them. It was a bit more unusual than it is now for a woman to be in this role, and it was kind of an office joke, that Clare would come into work with her bedroll demanding to be sent to the latest trouble spot. She was a tremendous enthusiast, very rumbustious, quite posh for the Guardian of that day, to be truthful."

Hollingworth was in Vietnam in 1966 when her husband wrote to say he was travelling to London for a check-up. She sensed danger and flew home immediately. He died of a heart attack very soon afterwards. Her colleagues, aware that her career had always been something her relationships had had to work around, were nonetheless left in no doubt of her devastation after Hoare's death - it was the only time in her life she ever asked for time off.

"Yes, I was amazed when he died," she recalls. "I didn't know he was so ill. And I needed some time to get over the ... To arrange flats and property and money." Soon after Hoare's death, Hetherington sent her back to Algeria, a decision she describes in her memoirs as one of the kindest acts anyone ever showed her. "I thought it was a very kind thing. Much better than my idea of staying and looking after everything. He said, 'I'm sorry, you must go there tomorrow.' It was a very kind thing." Does she find it easier not to get emotional? "Yes. Yes. I think so." She pauses. "I still miss him. I think I miss him every night. In bed. I'm not talking about sex, but we used to have a chat before we went to bed, with a half glass of beer or something, about what was happening in the world. And that I miss enormously."

She's had one lover, she volunteers, since Hoare died, "for a very short time, but it was a complete failure. I'd quite like to have had, I suppose, a boyfriend from time to time, for a trip to Timbuktu or Togoland, you know the kind of thing." She never wanted children, "because my career was so much more important. And I felt that if I did have children I should be morally obliged to look after them and their careers and everything. And that it was much better not to have any. So I took very good care not to have any."

She left the Guardian for the Telegraph in 1967. "The central part of it, I think, was that she wanted to go back to being a war correspondent, whereas the Guardian wanted a defence correspondent," recalls Fairhall. "As defence correspondent, generally speaking, I wasn't the person who was permanently on the spot in the warzone, because I was also in Whitehall dealing with British policy, Nato, the financial implications of it. All those other aspects didn't really interest Clare very much. And on the Guardian she was expected to be interested in all those things, as opposed to being ready with a passport and a toothbrush ready to dash off to foreign parts."

The Telegraph appointed her de facto foreign trouble-shooter, and sent her back to Vietnam, an assignment she relished - sitting on her bulletproof vest while flying over Vietcong villages in a US helicopter, or "accidentally" leaving her handbag in remote villages so she could return later, without her military handlers, to get a truer picture of their allegiances.

One of her most impressive scoops in Vietnam was thanks to the reputation she had established in Algeria. An anonymous Vietnamese man called at her hotel and asked if she had known certain Algerian communists. And would she meet him at the cathedral the next day? "We whispered in the dark near the empty Lady Chapel," reads her report in the Telegraph on May 1, 1968; he told her secret talks between Hanoi and Washington on US withdrawal would begin shortly and last at least a year.

She was convinced from the beginning that the Americans could never hope to win the conflict. "Basically the [south Vietnamese] population, although they pretended when they wanted a ham sandwich that they were frightfully pro-American, they were all really anti. It was things as simple as the fact that I spoke French and talked to them in French, so they didn't think that I was American, and so they told me much more."

In 1973 Hollingworth, then already 61, was given what was perhaps her toughest assignment yet - and, characteristically, one of the ones she most enjoyed - becoming the Telegraph's first resident correspondent in Beijing since the imposition of the "bamboo curtain" in 1949. It was an austere and isolated life: she lived alone in a hotel, banned, as a foreigner, from the underground transport system, forbidden even to dine with her interpreter, and faced with a wall of silence from ordinary Chinese people. And yet, as she writes in her memoirs, "I cannot now recall ever being lonely in China ... After dinner alone I used to go to my room and sit on a hard chair with a straight back and think how lucky I was to be in China!"

She met Henry Kissinger ("I thought very highly of him"), Ted Heath, who became a great friend, and Margaret Thatcher, with whom she was never terribly impressed; she had to beg her not to call the Chinese "Chinamen". Her reporting from China was distinguished, given the constraints under which she was working, but her eyesight was already failing, and her inability to speak the language inevitably hampered her work. "She was not much one for exclusives at that stage, dear old Clare, but she was very tenacious," says Paul Hill, the Telegraph's foreign desk manager who has worked at the paper since 1971 and is one of the few at Canary Wharf still close to Hollingworth. "She loved dealing with the military, the Chinese army; she was always trying to talk to the officers, but her interest in politics was not so great as anything military. She never learned a word of Mandarin, of course. But she was such a bloody hard worker."

She returned to the London office in 1976, but by the early 1980s, even before Conrad Black bought the paper, it was clear her era was passing. "The realisation was that we had to be cost-effective, foreign reporters had to learn the language, that kind of thing," says Hill. "Now we send our people for intensive language training. Clare wouldn't have coped with that." She officially retired from the paper in 1981, at 70. "We presented her with a toy rifle. I have a picture of her pointing it at us as we all gathered round her with our wine glasses." She would continue working from Hong Kong for almost a decade.

Neri Tenorio, a former Reuters journalist in Hong Kong and a close friend, is updating Hollingworth's 1990 memoir, Front Line, for re-publication, and was one of the first to visit her after surgery on her broken leg. "Right after the operation, as soon as she woke up from the anaesthetic, she was talking vividly about her most exciting moments in Algeria, the Balkans, Egypt." She laughs. "Actually, one of the first things she said was, 'If my leg and foot get better tomorrow and there's a war nearby, I'm going to go'."

Clare Hollingworth

Born: October 10, 1911, Knighton, Leics.

Education: South Lynn School, Eastbourne; Grammar School, Ashby de la Zouch; Domestic Science College, Leicester; School of Slavonic Studies; London university; Zagreb university.

Married: 1936 Vandaleur Robinson (diss. 1951); 1952 Geoffrey Hoare (died 1966).

Career: 1938-39 News Chronicle Fund for Refugees from the Sudetenland; 1939-41 foreign correspondent, Daily Telegraph; '50-63 foreign corr, Guardian; '63-67, defence corr, Guardian; '67-73, foreign corr, Daily Telegraph; '73-76 China corr, Daily Telegraph; '76-81, defence corr, Daily Telegraph; '81 Far East corr, Sunday Telegraph.

Books: 1940 Poland's Three Weeks' War; '45 There's a German Right Behind Me; '50 The Arabs and the West; '84 Mao and the Men Against Him; '90 Front Line (memoirs).