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.

Norwich was born at the Alfred House Nursing Home on Portland Place in Marylebone, London, on 15 September 1929.

He was the son of the 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.

After the war, he studied at the University of Strasbourg while his father was ambassador to France.

He completed his national service in the Royal Navy before taking a degree in French and Russian at New College, Oxford.

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.

His final Christmas Cracker was the 49th.

On his father's death in 1954, he inherited the title of Viscount Norwich, created for his father, Duff Cooper, in 1952.

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 radio panel game My Word! for four years (1978–82) and also a regional contestant on Round Britain Quiz.

He wrote and presented some 30 television documentaries, including The Fall of Constantinople, Napoleon's Hundred Days, Cortés and Montezuma, The Antiquities of Turkey, The Gates of Asia, Maximilian of Mexico, Toussaint l'Ouverture of Haiti, The Knights of Malta, Treasure Houses of Britain, and The Death of the Prince Imperial in the Zulu War.

Norwich also worked for various charitable projects.

He was the chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund, honorary chairman of the World Monuments Fund, a member of the General Committee of Save Venice, and a vice-president of the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies.

For many years he was a member of the Executive Committee of the National Trust, and also served on the board of the English National Opera.

Norwich was also a patron of SHARE Community, which provides vocational training to disabled people.

Christmas Crackers were compiled from whatever attracted Norwich: letters and diaries and gravestones and poems, boastful Who's Who entries, indexes from biographies, word games such as palindromes, holorhymes and mnemonics, occasionally in untranslated Greek, French, Latin, German or whatever language they were sourced from, as well as such oddities as a review from the American outdoors magazine Field and Stream concerning the republication of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Norwich was appointed to the Royal Victorian Order as a Commander in 1992 by Elizabeth II, as part of the celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary of her accession.

This gave him a right to sit in the House of Lords, though he lost this right with the House of Lords Act 1999.

It was put together during the early part of 2018 and he corrected the final proofs from his hospital bed before he died on 1 June 2018.

Norwich's first wife was Anne Frances May Clifford, daughter of the Hon. Sir Bede Clifford; they had one daughter, the Hon. Artemis Cooper, a historian, and a son, the Hon. Jason Charles Duff Bede Cooper, an architect.

After their divorce, Norwich married his second wife, the Hon. Mary (Makins) Philipps, daughter of The 1st Baron Sherfield.

Norwich was also the father of Allegra Huston, born of his affair with the American ballet dancer Enrica Soma while she was married to the American film director John Huston.

Norwich lived for much of his life in a large detached Victorian house in Warwick Avenue, in the heart of Little Venice in Maida Vale, London, very close to Regent's Canal.

He died at King Edward VII's Hospital in London on 1 June 2018, aged 88.

He is buried in St Mary on Paddington Green Church Churchyard.