Obituary: Oliver Knox

THE FIRST thing to be said about Oliver Knox is that he possessed in abundance what Dr Johnson identified as "the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gayety, an unfailing power of exciting laughter". To wit and to an exquisite ear for language he added a delicious talent for mimicry. I can recall his impromptu rendering, over 60 years ago, of a Churchillian wartime broadcast purporting to announce our defeat by the Germans after our fleet had been sunk "in the long waters of the North Sea". That touch of baroque meaninglessness is unforgettable.

In the long series of illnesses from which death has now released him, he was the patient of a specialist whose tone and accent were rendered by him as identical with those of the late Enoch Powell.

"I've got good news for you, Mr Knox, very good news."

"Oh yes?"

"You've got cancer of the prostate. A clear case of cancer of the prostate."

The spirit that could select the element of humour from so dark a situation was a rare one. He had a true sense of the ludicrous, happily free from every form of malice.

Oliver Arbuthnot Knox was born on Christmas Eve 1923, the son of Dillwyn Knox, the brilliant classical scholar who went on to scale the heights of genius in breaking enemy ciphers in both world wars. Elected to a scholarship at Eton in 1937 and at King's College, Cambridge, in 1942, Oliver Knox first served a year or two on the lower deck before being recruited to Bletchley Park.

Going up to Cambridge at the end of the Second World War to study Classics, he fell deeply in love with Patty Leith, a gifted artist with whom he eloped to the Greek island of Patmos with the intention of making a living as a writer. The marriage was ended only by his death more than 50 years later, but the books did not come for another three decades and even then, applauded as they were by such discriminating and disparate judges as Auberon Waugh and Lorna Sage, they would not have provided the means of bringing up the three sons and a daughter with which the union was blessed.

This was found by employment as a copywriter in one of the leading advertising agencies. Knox's instant success there enabled him to set up his own business, which he ran very profitably for 20 years before retiring to a gloriously beautiful, wholly unmodernised, farmhouse near Urbino in order to write novels and resume his classical studies at Urbino University. An Italian Delusion (1975) was followed by three further novels, resulting in his election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature.

Expatriate life did not altogether suit the Knoxes, who had many friends, not all of whom could take advantage of their enchanting Italian hospitality. For several years they divided their time between England, Italy and Ireland, where they had also acquired a family house by the sea.

Early in the 1980s Knox was recruited to run the publications department at the Centre for Policy Studies - the think tank founded by Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph in 1974 - then under the chairmanship of Hugh Thomas (now Lord Thomas of Swynnerton), with whom he enjoyed the happiest of collaborations. It is not too much to say that Knox revolutionised the funding, production and distribution of the publications of this organ of Conservative debate. His editorial gifts of wit, lucidity and ear for language lightened the ponderosities of political and social theorising.

Retiring from this last career in 1991 he was able to devote himself entirely to the hospitality and the reading of the ancient authors which had always been essential to him.

Oliver Arbuthnot Knox, writer and advertising executive: born High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire 24 December 1923; FRSL 1982; married 1948 Patty Leith (three sons, one daughter); died London 17 July 2002.

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