He then became a graduate trainee on The Journal, a newspaper based in
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and later joined the Daily Mail in
Manchester and returned to Newcastle as its regional chief reporter. He was recruited by The Sunday Times in 1965 and transferred to The Times in 1967. He was a foreign correspondent for ten years, opening The Times bureau in
South Africa but was later expelled from the country after he had been described by the
apartheid-era authorities as being a "pernicious liberal". Instead, he became the newspaper's bureau chief in Germany, but after
Rupert Murdoch acquired The Times in 1981, he left and joined The Guardian the next year.[1] He served as the publication's chief foreign leader-writer before he left the title in 1988 to write books. He continued to write obituaries for The Guardian.[1]
Selected works
van der Vat, Dan (1983). The Last Corsair: The Story of the Emden. Birlinn Ltd.
ISBN1-84158-061-9. (published as Gentlemen of War, The Amazing Story of Captain Karl von Müller and the SMS Emden in the US)