Norman Lewis

Norman Lewis was born in Enfield in 1908, the son of a chemist who was probably not clinically insane despite family mythology to the contrary. He came to travel writing late, after a career as a trader in cameras and languages in prewar Spain and wartime intelligence work in Italy.

A Dragon Apparent (1951), his account of journeys through French Indochina — now Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam — in the months before the First Indochina War, is considered his masterpiece. He described the final months of a traditional society on the edge of destruction with the attention of a reporter and the sensitivity of a novelist. The dragon of the title is the dragon of change — colonial, then communist, then American — that he watched approaching.

Golden Earth (1952) applied the same attention to Burma. Naples '44 (1978), based on his wartime diary, is the best account of occupied Italy that any English writer produced. The Missionaries (1988) is an investigation of evangelical American Christianity in South America and its impact on indigenous communities — journalism of the highest order.

Lewis continued travelling and writing until his nineties. He was 95 when he died, and his late books about Spain, Sicily, and the Mafia show a writer who never stopped being astonished by the world.