Peter Nichols

Peter Nichols (15 February 1928 – 11 January 1989) was an English newspaper journalist and author on history, politics and society. He was based in Rome, from where he reported, between 1957 and his death.

Biography Peter Nicols was born in England at Portsmouth, which he would later describe (to a southern Italian audience) as "a sort of British Taranto" ("...un tipo di Taranto britannica"). He was the only son of Walter Ernest Nichols (1898–1974) by his marriage to Beatrice Alice Jutsum.(1898–1980). He studied at the University of Oxford from where he emerged with a degree in History. A career in journalism followed. In 1953 he joined The Times of London, at that time under the editorship of William Haley, and accepted a posting as a foreign correspondent, reporting from Berlin and Bonn till 1957. That year his transfer to Rome marked the start of more than three decades during which he provided newspaper editors in London with lucid and scholarly analyses and reports on Italian customs and politics. "The Pope's divisions: The Roman Catholic Church today", published in 1981, takes its title from a 1935 quotation attributed to Josef Stalin, who was scoffing at the absence of "real world military power" available to Pius XI.

Peter Nichols spent his final months in enforced retirement due to ill health. He died of a brain haemorrhage at his home in Bracciano (Rome) a few weeks short of what would have been his sixty-first birthday.

Personal Peter Nichols married, firstly, Marie Pamela Foulkes (1928–2017) at Portsmouth in 1950, which was followed by the births of their four children between 1951 and 1957 His second marriage, in 1974, was to the film star Paola Rosi, and was followed, some nine years later, by the birth of his third son.

Appreciation In 1985, at the thirty-eighth Borgighera International Salon of Humour ("Salone Internazionale dell'Umorismo di Bordighera"), and despite being a non-Italian, Nichols was the recipient of that year's "Golden Palm" ("Palma d'Oro") award in recognition of the "subtle irony" which was a constant strand in his prose. In 1999 Paola Rosi/Nichols marked the tenth anniversary of her late husband's death by announcing to the press that the (then) Australian newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch had dedicated a room to Peter Nichols in his private museum, devoted to "the most significant personalities of the twentieth century".