John Julius Norwich

John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, (15 September 1929 – 1 June 2018), known as John Julius Norwich, was an English popular historian, travel writer, and television personality.

Background

Norwich was born at the Alfred House Nursing Home on Portland Place in Marylebone, London, on 15 September 1929. He was the son of Conservative politician and diplomat Duff Cooper, later Viscount Norwich, and of Lady Diana Manners, a celebrated beauty and society figure. He was given the name "Julius" in part because he was born by caesarean section. Such was his mother's fame as an actress and beauty that the birth attracted a crowd outside the nursing home and hundreds of letters of congratulations. Through his father, he was descended from King William IV and his mistress Dorothea Jordan.

He was educated at Egerton House School in Dorset Square, London, later becoming a boarder at the school when it was evacuated to Northamptonshire before the outbreak of the Second World War. Because his father as Minister of Information was high on the Nazi enemies list of British politicians, Norwich's parents feared for their son's safety in the event of a German invasion of Britain. In 1940 they decided to send him away after the US ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, offered to bring him to the United States with other evacuee children on board the SS ''Washington''. He attended Upper Canada College, Toronto, Canada, while spending his holidays with the family of William S. Paley on Long Island in New York. In 1942 he returned to Britain, where he attended Eton College and the University of Strasbourg. He completed his national service in the Royal Navy before taking a degree in French and Russian at New College, Oxford.

Career

Joining the British Foreign Service after Oxford, John Julius Cooper served in Yugoslavia and Lebanon and as a member of the British delegation to the Disarmament Conference in Geneva. On his father's death in 1954, he inherited the title of Viscount Norwich, created for his father, Duff Cooper, in 1952. This gave him a right to sit in the House of Lords, though he lost this right with the House of Lords Act 1999.

In 1964, Norwich left the diplomatic service to become a writer. His subsequent books included histories of Sicily under the Normans (1967, 1970), Venice (1977, 1981), the Byzantine Empire (1988, 1992, 1995), the Mediterranean (2006) and the Papacy (2011), amongst others (see list below). He also served as editor of series such as ''Great Architecture of the World'', ''The Italian World'', ''The New Shell Guides to Great Britain'', ''The Oxford Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Art'' and the ''Duff Cooper Diaries''.

Norwich worked extensively in radio and television. He was host of the BBC
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