Peter David

He was a brilliant man—but also wise, a rare combination. In argument, he was razor sharp, yet gentle. Gentleness was his most salient trait. He had no taste for stamping on opponents he had defeated. He would sometimes win arguments almost imperceptibly, guiding his challenger to the right answer. He took his work most seriously, worried about it more than he let on, and thought it mattered to be right, yet always took himself unseriously. He was funny, specializing in jokes at his own expense. The result of these perfectly balanced contrasts was a completely irresistible man. He was the least demanding and most rewarding of friends. He never tried to charm, but never failed to. Everyone he met thought he was wonderful, and they were right.

David became the Washington bureau chief for Nature, the world's most cited journal on science. In 1984 he then joined The Economist as a science writer. He soon became the magazine's "main authority" on the Middle East while also writing the Bagehot column covering British politics and running its business sections. Later, he became its foreign editor for international topics, acting as "editorial manager and senior writer."

After graduating from the University of London in 1972, where he studied sociology, he took jobs as a journalist for various magazines, among those were journals covering house plants and UFOs.

Peter David was born in Johannesburg, South Africa to a family of Lithuanian Jews who had settled in South Africa decades earlier to escape pogroms. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a left-wing political activist who fought against the apartheid government. After the Sharpeville massacre there in 1960, where 69 people were killed by police, she feared arrest and the family relocated to London within days. They eventually settled in Liverpool.

Peter David (September 7, 1951 – May 10, 2012) was the Washington bureau chief and primary U.S. political correspondent for The Economist, the U.K.-based weekly magazine, with which he worked for his last 28 years. He supervised coverage of the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s and became the magazine's foreign editor from 2002 to 2009, covering the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. David also previously authored the "Bagehot" column on British politics, before finally moving to the U.S. to author the "Lexington" column on American politics.