Peter Hopkirk

Peter Hopkirk (15 December 1930 – 22 August 2014) was an award winning British journalist, author and historian who wrote six books about the British Empire, Russia and Central Asia. His military and family background stood him in good stead for a future writing career about dangerous places, difficult situations, espionage and intrigue.

Peter Hopkirk was born in Nottingham, the son of Frank Stewart Hopkirk, a prison chaplain and, Mary Perkins. He grew up at Danbury, Essex, noticeable for the historic palace of the Bishop of Rochester. Peter Hopkirk was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford. The family hailed originally from the borders of Scotland in Roxburghshire where there was a rich history of barbaric raids and rievers hanging justice. It must have resonated with his writings in the history of the lawless frontiers of the British Empire. From an early age he was interested in spy novels carrying around Buchan's Greenmantle and Kipling's Kim stories about India. At the Dragon he played rugby, and shot at Bisley.

Before turning full-time author, he was an ITN reporter and newscaster for two years, the New York City correspondent of Lord Beaverbrook's The Sunday 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 the South African Drum. Before entering Fleet Street, he served as a subaltern in the King's African Rifles in 1949 – in the same battalion as Lance-Corporal Idi Amin, later to emerge as a Ugandan tyrant.

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