Before turning full-time author, he was an ITN reporter and newscaster for two years, the New York correspondent of Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express, and then worked for nearly twenty years on The Times; five as its chief reporter, and latterly as a Middle East and Far East specialist. In the 1950s, he edited the West African news magazine Drum, sister paper to its legendary South African namesake. Before entering Fleet Street, he served as a subaltern in the King's African Rifles – in the same battalion as Lance-Corporal Idi Amin, later to emerge as the Ugandan tyrant.
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