Reporters usually get short shrift from editors if they try to write headlines for their stories, but Richard West came up with one that couldn’t be bettered when he was sent to Athens in 1967 to cover the Greek colonels’ coup: “Plato’s Banana Republic”.
He was a brilliant and prolific writer, on two occasions writing every article in single-subject issues of the Sunday Times Magazine in the pre-Murdoch days of the 60s – one on the white-governed states of Africa, the other on the rise and rise of Germany.
