Sir Harold Evans, crusading publisher and author, dies at 92

NEW YORK » Sir Harold Evans, the charismatic publisher, author and muckraker who brought investigative moxie to the British press, newsmaking dash to the American book business through best-sellers like “Primary Colors” and synergetic buzz to all as author-publisher Tina Brown’s husband, has died. He was 92.

Brown said he died Wednesday in New York of congestive heart failure. She added that there would be a “very small” family funeral, and, depending on the status of the coronavirus pandemic, a celebration next June in London.

“He was the love of my life,” Brown wrote Thursday in an email to The Associated Press. “His magical optimism lifted up our family every day he was alive and I could have achieved nothing without him by my side.”

A vision of British erudition and sass, Evans was a high-profile go-getter, starting in the 1960s as an editor of the Northern Echo and the Sunday Times of London and continuing into the 1990s as president of Random House. His marriage to Brown was a paradigm of media clout and A-list access that helped shape the book and magazine markets for years and helped embody the term “synergy” for businesses reinforcing each other.

A defender of literature and print journalism well into the digital age, Evans was one of the all-time newspaper editors, startling British society with revelations of espionage, corporate wrongdoing and government scandal. In the U.S., he published such attentiongetters as the mysterious political novel “Primary Colors” and memoirs by such unlikely authors as Manuel Noriega and Marlon Brando.

He was knighted by his native Britain in 2004 for his contributions to journalism.

“Harold Evans was a true genius. I know of no one else who had the range he had with words — as crusading editor, thoughtful writer, book publisher, book author and most importantly in energetic conversation,” Bob Woodward wrote in an email Thursday to the AP.

He held his own, and more, with the world’s elite, but was mindful of his working class background: a locomotive driver’s son, born in Lancashire, England, in 1928, and evacuated to Wales during World War II. After serving in the Royal Air Force, he studied politics and economics at Durham University and received a master’s in foreign policy. The drive to report, to expose, dated back to his teens, when he discovered that newspapers had wildly romanticized the Battle of Dunkirk between German and British soldiers.