CLAUD COCKBURN was in many ways the best of journalists, if in some ways the worst. Anyone who wants to understand our trade should read him, learn, and argue with him as he is revealed in his wonderful autobiographies, published in one volume as I, Claud. Now his son Patrick, another exemplary journalist, has written a life that deals with much that was omitted or glossed over in the autobiographies. Although it stops in about 1945, with Cockburn’s abandonment of Stalinism and retreat to Ireland, it covers all his years of action and struggle against Hitler.

Cockburn had many rare gifts as a journalist; it is rarer still to find them combined in one person. Curiosity, courage, intelligence, attention to language, charm, and fluency are all obvious. His birth and upbringing also gave him a certain personal as well as professional detachment from the great events and struggles into which he threw himself. Like his cousin Evelyn Waugh, and his friend Graham Greene, he was raised in an imperial class that saw the world as their natural possession, and given an education that made him a dual citizen of the past and the present.

He delighted in the “incomparable” memoirs of the 17th-century French Cardinal de Retz, a man possessed of every vice but hypocrisy, all of them marshalled in the service of ambition. He made a point of being Scottish, as his distinguished Cockburn ancestors had been, although he lived in Scotland only briefly, as a small child who spoke only Chinese: his father had been a British diplomat in China for nearly 40 years. In some sense, he was always a foreign correspondent, whether in England, Ireland, or abroad.

These were all virtues in a journalist and attractive qualities in a man. What were the vices? He was, for about ten years, a Stalinist hack, under the name of Frank Pitcairn. He had no hesitation about lying in that cause. Yesterday’s women held as little interest for him as yesterday’s news. He left, with no sign of regret, two wives while they were pregnant. (The third wife stuck, and they raised three sons together, all of whom grew up to excel at the craft of journalism).

Cockburn’s overriding political passion was a hatred of bullying and of pomposity, coupled with the conviction that he could and must do something to fight against them. He was an early and implacable enemy of Nazism. He did not hesitate to fight in the front lines in Spain. Much later, he was an encouragement and mentor to the founders of Private Eye.

Journalism, Claud Cockburn said, was something between entertainment and advertising. All that a journalist needed to consider was whom he wanted to entertain and what cause he wanted to advertise or advance.

Truth and literary merit are wholly absent from this picture, but only a man who really loved both could see with so few illusions where they are not much wanted.

Andrew Brown is a writer and journalist.

Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the invention of guerrilla journalism
Patrick Cockburn
Verso £30
(978-1-80429-074-3)
Church Times Bookshop £27