A diplomat turned historian made Byzantium and Venice bestsellers
John Julius Norwich was named Julius partly because he arrived by caesarean section. The son of the politician Duff Cooper and the actress Diana Manners, he quit the Foreign Service in 1964 to write, producing popular histories of Norman Sicily, Venice and Byzantium and some 30 television documentaries.
He was born in Marylebone on 15 September 1929, and his mother's fame drew a crowd outside the nursing home along with hundreds of congratulatory letters. Through his father he descended from King William IV and the actress Dorothea Jordan. Because Duff Cooper, as Minister of Information, ranked high on the Nazi list of enemies, the boy was sent across the Atlantic in 1940 on an offer from the American ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. He studied at Upper Canada College in Toronto, came home in 1942 for Eton, and later took French and Russian at New College, Oxford, after naval national service.
Diplomacy came first. Joining the Foreign Service in 1952, he served in Yugoslavia and Lebanon and sat on the British delegation to the disarmament talks in Geneva. When his father died in 1954 he inherited the title Viscount Norwich and with it a seat in the House of Lords, which he kept until the reforms of 1999.
Writing made his name. His two volumes on the Normans in southern Italy appeared in 1967 and 1970, followed by Venice in 1977 and 1981 and a three-part history of Byzantium between 1988 and 1995, with later books on the Mediterranean and the papacy. On radio he hosted the BBC panel game My Word! for four years from 1978, and on screen he covered subjects from the fall of Constantinople to the Knights of Malta. He chaired the Venice in Peril Fund and served for years on the National Trust's executive committee.
Each year he also assembled a Christmas Cracker, a private anthology of oddities: gravestone inscriptions, boastful reference-book entries, palindromes and untranslated scraps of Latin or German. The 49th and last was compiled in early 2018, and he corrected its proofs from a hospital bed. Heart failure ended his life on 1 June 2018, when he was 88.
Source: John Julius Norwich
