Born in Wandsworth, London, he attended Bec Grammar School (later to be Ernest Bevin Comprehensive, and then Academy).
[1] Between novels, he married Lesley Ann Sillitoe and together they taught for a time in Nigeria,[1] and started a family.
[1] Jones served for a time as a Labour councillor for Tulse Hill, Lambeth, in the same period (early 1970s) as John Major and Ken Livingstone.
[2] Other oddities saw him interviewing Robert Maxwell, owner of the Mirror Newspaper Group, on television, shortly before Maxwell's death by drowning, and being invited to meet Saddam Hussein in Iraq for a "writer's conference", where he was to lay a wreath for the Unknown Soldier "on Britain's behalf".
In the 1960s and 1970s, Jones became a "significant voice in the London literary journalism", described at his death as being "among the outstanding British intellectual journalists of the past 40 years"[4] until a series of strokes, and mental health issues, lead to an early retirement, first to the Sussex coast, and then to Woodstock, Oxon.