Richard West (18 July 1930 – 25 April 2015) was a British journalist and author best known for his reporting of the
Vietnam War and
Yugoslavia.[1] He is described by
Damian Thompson as "one of the finest foreign correspondents of the 20th century",[2] with a career that covered the span of the Cold War in most of its theatres.
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",[3] 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),[4]An English Journey (1981) and Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia (1995).[5] 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.[6][7]
^Naimark, Norman; Case, Holly (2003). Yugoslavia and its historians: understanding the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Stanford University Press. p. 227.
ISBN0-8047-4594-3.