Alaric Jacob

[1] Like several other promising children from Anglo-Indian or military families, Jacob attended St Cyprian's School for reduced fees.

English novelist George Orwell left the school the year before Jacob started, and was presented as an inspiration to the students.

[1] Jacob's first term at St Cyprian's overlapped with English writer and literary critic Cyril Connolly's last year there.

He was withdrawn from Tobruk shortly before it fell to the Germans and was posted to Tehran where he received permission from the Soviet Embassy to visit the Red Army in Azerbaijan.

[5] After Christmas leave in England in 1943, Jacob and Iris sailed to the Soviet Union in January 1944 on board a ship of the Arctic Convoy.

They spent the remainder of the war in Moscow, covering the advances of the Red Army in Odessa, the Crimea, and through Vitebsk, Minsk, Poland, and on to the fall of Berlin.

He suspected that her membership of the Communist Party worked against him even when they were separated, and that he was blacklisted by the BBC and put on their "Christmas tree" list of potential political subversives as a result.

In August 1948, Jacob joined the BBC monitoring service in Caversham, Reading, but in February 1951 he was "suddenly refused establishment rights, which meant he would receive no pension".

[9] By the time he retired in 1972, Jacob had become a senior editor at Bush House, then the base of the BBC World Service.

In 1971, Jacob published Eminent Nonentities, a book of short stories about the unknown characters he encountered as a war correspondent.

"He possessed the grand manner of an Edwardian foreign correspondent with an Alan-Clark-like taste for vintage claret, a good cigar and fine brandy".