Christopher Sykes (author)

For other people named Christopher Sykes, see Christopher Sykes (disambiguation).

Christopher Hugh Sykes FRSL (17 November 1907 – 8 December 1986) was an English author. Born into a wealthy north-of-England land-owning family, he was the second son of the diplomat Sir Mark Sykes (1879–1919).

In the years 1933–1934 he traveled in Central Asia with Robert Byron, who later wrote The Road to Oxiana about this long travel in an almost unexplored country. Nowadays Sykes is especially remembered for his biography of his friend, Evelyn Waugh (an adult convert to Catholicism, whereas Sykes was Catholic all his life) and, to a lesser extent, for his classic history of the British Mandate of Palestine, Crossroads to Israel (1965). During the Second World War he served in the British Army, and after 1945 he worked for many years in BBC Radio, as well as writing for several British and American periodicals including The New Republic, The Spectator, and the short-lived English Review Magazine. He was invested as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Marriage and family

He married Camilla Georgiana Russell, daughter of Sir Thomas Wentworth Russell and Evelyn Dorothea Temple Moore, on 25 October 1936. Their son Mark Richard Sykes (born 9 June 1937), by his second marriage, was father to six children including New York-based fashion writer and novelist Plum Sykes.

Bibliography

• Orde Wingate, a biography, (1959)
• Nancy: The Life of Lady Astor (1972)
• Crossroads to Israel, 1917-48 (1973)
• Evelyn Waugh: a biography (1975)
• Four Studies in Loyalty (1986)
• Black Sheep
• Tormented loyalty; the story of a German aristocrat who defied Hitler
• The National Trust Country House Album
• Answer to question 33
• Ancient English Homes
• Character & situation : six short stories (2007)
• A song of a shirt
• High-minded murder
• Dates & parties
• Leasehold Enfranchisement and the Right to Manage: A Practical Guide
• Troubled Loyalty. A Biography of Adam Von Trott zu Solz (1968)
• Two Studies in Virtue

References

Persondata
Name	Sykes, Christopher
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Date of birth	17 November 1907
Place of birth
Date of death	8 December 1986
Place of death