THE dour corridor of filing cabinets that Stephen Heder uses as an office at London's School of Oriental and African Studies might, on second thoughts, have been a better choice of venue for the interview.
Instead, we had opted for a bright yellow-walled cafe nestled in a side street near the British Museum. While fellow customers picked uneasily at lemon cakes and cappuccinos, Heder's flat American drawl described "smashings" - the Khmer Rouge's brutally uneuphemistic euphemism for political murder - and the death of two million people in the Cambodian killing fields. Full article