His father, George, was a partner in a firm of wholesale dressmakers, and his mother, (Minnie) Hilda (née Pomeroy) had been a dress model at Harrods.

[1] Newby was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, PG21, at Chieti, a few miles inland from Pescara on the Adriatic coast, and later to PG49 at Fontanellato, near Parma.

Escaping with Michael Gilbert[10] and other British prisoners after the Italian Armistice, he was helped to hide in the Apennine countryside by a Slovene anti-fascist woman, Vanda Škof (later Wanda Skof),[11] who married him after the war and became a companion on his travels.

A film, In Love and War, was made in 2001 based on the book, starring Callum Blue as Newby and Barbora Bobuľová as Wanda.

In the same decade, he made travelogues for the BBC, returning to Parma with his wife Wanda in The Travel Show (TV programme) (1994) and visiting one of his favourite cities, Istanbul (1996), both films directed by Paul Coueslant.