Born in London, West attended Marlborough College before his national service spell in Trieste awakened a lifelong interest in Yugoslavia.
Starting off his journalistic career at the Manchester Guardian, West became a foreign correspondent in Yugoslavia, Africa, Central America and Indochina.
Described by Neal Ascherson as the "paragon of the independent journalist for his generation",[3] he would spend much of the next two decades in Vietnam, Africa and eastern Europe, where he was codenamned Agent Friday by Communist Poland's secret police.
[5] Along with Patrick Marnham and Auberon Waugh, West was one of three signatories to a letter to The Times that called for a British monument to honour those repatriated as a result of the Yalta Conference; it was eventually erected in 1986.
[6][7] He was the grandson of the classics scholar Walter Leaf and the great-grandson of poet John Addington Symonds, and was married to the Irish journalist Mary Kenny.