Keith Kyle, Reporting the World

Keith Kyle was 'the epitome of the intellectual journalist' and the foremost historian of the Suez War. In this, his posthumously published autobiography, he takes the reader on a spectacular and exhilarating journey through the political history of the later 20th century, to the heart of world-shaking international crises where great events, people and places come to life. The clarity, expertise, enthusiasm and essential modesty with which he wrote gave his international audience the vital feeling of involvement and being there. Here was a reporter - and he claimed to be no more - of rare skill, intelligence, humanity and true moral purpose. Keith Kyle's extraordinary career took him from history at Oxford with A.J.P. Taylor, military service in India and Burma (ending as 'an unlikely infantry captain'), to the BBC World Service. He was recruited for The Economist by Geoffrey Crowther to act as Political and Parliamentary Correspondent in Washington, where he was at the epicentre of world politics. He was in Washington when the Suez crisis broke - the subject of his major history, Suez: Britain's End of Empire in the Middle East, which has defined the subject to the present. Keith Kyle's radio and television journalism brought him into countless British homes as BBC Talks Producer but he also held political ambitions which saw him contesting - unsuccessfully - St Albans and Braintree for Labour and Northampton South for the SDP/Alliance. In Keith Kyle's last years his life evolved from his years of vivid reporting of world politics, to scholarly research and writing at the John F Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard; St Antony's College, Oxford; the RIIA at Chatham House; and, the University of Ulster, where he was Visiting Professor of History.