XPost: alt.obituaries, soc.history
From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net

On Sat, 2 Jun 2018 19:39:10 -0700 (PDT), That Derek
<thatderek@yahoo.com> wrote:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/01/john-julius-norwich-obituary

History books

John Julius Norwich obituary

Writer and broadcaster keen to share his many passions

Judith Flanders
Fri 1 Jun 2018 13.16 EDT Last modified on Fri 1 Jun 2018 19.03 EDT

John Julius Norwich, who has died aged 88, called himself a writer and broadcaster. He was really a man of many enthusiasms – for books,
music, architecture, paintings – and his great talent was to be able
to convey those passions to the public at large, through books, radio broadcasts and in nearly three dozen television documentaries from the
BBC, on subjects ranging from the fall of Constantinople, through
Napoleon’s final 100 days’ campaign, to Haiti’s revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture.

The great love of his life was Venice. He visited the Italian city
more than 200 times and spent decades dedicated to its preservation
and protection, from 1970 as chairman of the Venice in Peril fund and
company chairman of the World Monuments Fund. He also ensured that
people knew why it was worth protecting, publishing the massive
two-volume A History of Venice (1977, 1981), as well as The Italian
World (1983), Venice: A Traveller’s Companion (1990) and, with HC
Robbins Landon, Five Centuries of Music in Venice (1991).

John Julius was the son of the MP Duff Cooper and his wife, Lady Diana
Cooper (nee Manners), daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland and a
well-known society beauty. At his christening, John Julius’s mother
arranged 17 godparents, all chosen, according to her son, for the size
of their wallets. They included the financier Otto Kahn, the writers
Maurice Baring and JM Barrie, the press baron Lord Beaverbrook and the
Aga Khan. (On Norwich’s first marriage, he related, the Aga Khan gave
him a nest of wickerwork tables, “and I’ve never been more
disappointed in my life”.)

The child of older parents, born after a long wait, he was cherished
and adored by his mother, with whom he spent a great deal more time
than was usual for the period. She taught him to read at four, and at
five he was learning French, with trips to Aix-les-Bains, in
south-eastern France, in the holidays to improve his accent. Diana
“was my greatest inspiration”, he said, and his unconventionally conventional upbringing can be read in the early chapters of Scoop,
where his mother’s friend Evelyn Waugh immortalised her as Mrs Stitch.

Duff Cooper was shy, even with his own child, and his main method of communication was to read to him, and recite, teaching his son to do
the same in return and thus beginning John Julius’s long career as a performer. In 1937 Duff Cooper was made first lord of the Admiralty,
and the family moved to Admiralty House, off Trafalgar Square, where
John Julius’s nursery overlooked Horse Guards Parade. This did not
last long.

Cooper resigned in disgust at the Munich agreement, and shortly
afterwards John Julius was evacuated to the US for the duration of the
war. Not for him the tragic plight of the small child wearing a
luggage label. He went with his nanny, and spent the first part of the
war living with William Paley, the multi-millionaire chairman of CBS television, at his family estate in Long Island. He was sent to a
private boys’ school, Upper Canada college in Toronto, before
returning to Britain and Eton college.

By this time, his father had been made ambassador to Paris (an episode
wickedly guyed by Nancy Mitford in Don’t Tell Alfred), and John Julius
was sent to the University of Strasbourg before a more conventional
stint studying French and Russian at New College, Oxford.

In 1952 his father was made Viscount Norwich. In the same year, after
national service, John Julius entered the Foreign Office, and married
Anne Clifford. From 1955 to 1957 he was third secretary at the British
embassy in Belgrade; crawling up the ladder, in 1957 he was moved to
Beirut, as second secretary, where he served until 1960. From there he
began to explore, when on leave, the Middle and near east, whose
history was to preoccupy him for so many years. In 1960 he joined the
British delegation to the Disarmament Conference in Geneva.

During this time, when on leave, he went to Sicily for two weeks. He
was fascinated by the meeting of three great civilisations in the
middle ages: Norman, Byzantine and Saracen, “and of course I wanted to
know more”. There were no books about it in the London Library, so he
decided that he must write one instead, and in 1964 he resigned from
the Foreign Office. He wrote first a book about Mount Athos, with
Reresby Sitwell, and then published The Normans in the South (1967),
which was received as a work of popularising genius, and set his
course.

At the same time, he was beginning his career as a documentary
film-maker and broadcaster, in particular covering the city of Venice.
He had first set foot in the city aged 16, when he was taken on a day
trip by his parents. Nearly half a century later, he combined the two
in Maestro (1991), a five-part televised history of music in La
Serenissima.

For music was another passion, and, more particularly, opera. From
1977 to 1981, he sat on the board of English National Opera, and in
1985 wrote 50 Years of Glyndebourne: An Illustrated History. From high
to low, he covered it all, and on Radio 4 was a frequent contestant on
Round Britain Quiz, and chair of My Word between 1978 and 1982. He
joined a group of like-minded “great and good” who wanted to set up Heritage Broadcasting, a radio station for “accessibility and
awareness of all the arts”. When that did not materialise, and after
Classic FM won the franchise, he joined it in 1994, broadcasting an
“evening concert” five days a week for two and a half years, to an
audience of five million, until he was abruptly sacked in order to
bring in a more “popular” style. The great populariser was hurt, and
there was a loud protest from his audience, who relished his
knowledge, his wit, and his ability to pronounce Dvo?ák without
flinching.

In the late 1980s Norwich set about a history of the Byzantine empire
from its creation by Constantine the Great in the fourth century to
its ignominious fall to the Turks 1,100 years later. Astonishingly,
considering the magnitude of the task, he accomplished it in eight
years and a mere thousand pages. It is indicative of the author’s
populist character that, while historians lined up to praise his
achievement, the two readers he was proudest of were an immigration
officer at an airport in New York, who looked at his passport and
simply said, “When is volume three coming out?”, and a man in Oregon
who wrote to him: “Tomorrow I will go back to work as a welder for the railroad, but tonight I am the acting emperor of Byzantium.” The three volumes of Byzantium appeared between 1988 and 1995.

Two thousand years of history was no obstacle, and his history of the
popes appeared in 2011, with Norwich modestly claiming to have met
only four (Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul I). Despite
such access, he was acerbic when necessary, condemning John Paul II’s
500-odd canonisations, and noting waspishly that “suddenly we have
saints like other people have mice”. In 2015 he was awarded the Biographers’ Club award for his lifetime service to biography.

Accessible to all, Norwich was happy publicly to list his home address
and phone number, latterly adding his e-mail address, in case the
first two were not sufficient.

His first marriage ended in divorce in 1985, and in 1989 he married
Mollie Philipps. She survives him, as do his son, Jason, an architect,
and daughter, the historian Artemis Cooper, from his first marriage,
and a daughter, the writer Allegra Huston, from a relationship with
the dancer Enrica Soma, wife of the film director John Huston.

• John Julius Cooper, Viscount Norwich, author and broadcaster, born
15 September 1929; died 1 June 2018

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