Born in
London, West attended
Marlborough College before his
national service spell in
Trieste awakened a lifelong interest in Yugoslavia. Starting off his journalistic career at the
Manchester Guardian, West became a foreign correspondent in Yugoslavia, Africa, Central America and
Indochina. Described by
Neal Ascherson as the "paragon of the independent journalist for his generation", he would spend much of the next two decades in Vietnam, Africa and eastern Europe, where he was codenamned Agent Friday by Communist Poland's secret police. Among his books are
The Making of the Prime Minister (with
Anthony Howard),
An English Journey (1981) and
Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia (1995). Along with
Patrick Marnham and
Auberon Waugh, West was one of three signatories to a letter to
The Times that called for a British monument to honour those repatriated as a result of the
Yalta Conference; it was
eventually erected in 1986. ==Personal life and death==