Crusading newspaper editor reinvented himself as a book publisher in New York

Sir Harold Evans, who has died aged 92, was a crusading journalist who campaigned on behalf of thalidomide victims, battled press censorship and helped expose corruption and cronyism while editor of the Sunday Times in London, then remade himself as a book, magazine and newspaper editor in the United States.

Evans was a charismatic emblem of an earlier era in journalism, when national newspapers were a glamorous and highly profitable enterprise brought to life by the clacking of manual typewriters and thunder of enormous Linotype machines.

Raised in the north of England, he attended neither

Cambridge nor Oxford and lacked the upperclass pedigree of many of his peers in newspaper management. He built a hard-charging reputation, overseeing highprofile investigative work and campaigns on issues varying from the price of groceries to inadequate cervical cancer tests. At his career pinnacle in England, he edited the venerable

Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981.

‘‘All I tried to do – all I hoped to do – was to shed a little light,’’ he told the Independent in 2010. ‘‘And if that light grew weeds, we’d have to try and pull them up.’’

He helped modernise one of Britain’s most influential but staid papers, sharpening the

Sunday Times’ design and filling its pages with stories that reflected the sweeping changes of the late 1960s. He also helped turn its collaborative reporting team, Insight, into a powerhouse of investigative journalism.

Under his watch, the Sunday Times revealed new details about intelligence officer Kim Philby’s work as a Soviet spy; published the diaries of the late Labour minister Richard Crossman, offering insight into the inner workings of government while risking prosecution under the Official Secrets Act; and fought for compensation for the victims of thalidomide, a morning-sickness drug that killed thousands of babies in the womb and caused severe birth defects before it was taken off the market in 1961.

With his second wife, Tina Brown, Evans later became a force in American media, settling in New York after clashes with Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Sunday Times and its sister paper, The Times, in 1981. He named Evans editor of The Times but sacked him a year later.

While Brown edited Vanity Fair and later the New Yorker, remaking two of the country’s most storied magazines, Evans worked for their parent company, Advance. He served as the founding editor of Conde Nast Traveler, launching the magazine in 1987 with a focus on literary journalism and hard news reporting, and led the trade division of Random House for seven years.

He acquired the rights to publish Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father, edited books by Henry Kissinger and emerged as a best-selling author in his own right, notably with The American Century (1998) and They Made America (2004).

Wiry and diminutive, Evans seemed to have boundless energy; the Daily Telegraph once likened him to ‘‘a coiled spring forever unwinding’’. His views on journalism were summed up in an interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail: ‘‘News is whatever someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising.’’

Harold Matthew Evans was born in Manchester to a train-driver father, and a mother who ran a corner store from their home. He started his journalism career at 16, writing letters to newspapers in or around Manchester before finding a job at a weekly paper. After serving in the Royal Air Force, he took a similar approach to college, writing to every university in England before enrolling at the University of Durham, where he studied politics and economics.

He became editor of the regional daily Northern Echo before joining the Sunday Times in 1966. In his 1983 memoir Good Times, Bad Times, he wrote that ‘‘My ambition got the better of my judgment’’ in accepting Murdoch’s offer to edit the Times.

He said he admired Murdoch’s ‘‘gratifying defeat of the Luddite unions’’, but came to view him as anti-democratic, and was fired a few weeks after being voted Britain’s editor of the year. Murdoch denied editorial involvement, and said he fired Evans after being told a staff rebellion was brewing. Evans was knighted in 2004 for services to journalism.

His first marriage, to schoolteacher Enid Parker, ended in divorce after Evans met Brown. Survivors include three children from his first marriage, and two from his second.

While Brown’s career took off in the United States, Evans had a lower profile, and was not as sociable as his wife. At their New York townhouse, gatherings would be so full of starry names, from Kissinger to Robert De Niro and Martin Amis, that they would clear out all their furniture, which would be driven around Manhattan in a truck for 24 hours. ‘‘I think Harry would rather have been in the truck with the furniture,’’ Brown noted. – Washington Post/The Times

‘‘News is whatever someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising.’’ Sir Harold Evans