I see in today’s Times that the family of Robert Elegant have placed a notice of his death — frankly I am rather surprised that he doesn’t warrant a larger official obituary. Thrice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his Asia reporting, a confidante of both Nixon and Kissinger and the biographer of multiple Communist Party bigwigs, he will be most remembered for his many novels on East Asian historical subjects, particularly the brick-sized Imperial China series, Manchu, Mandarin and Dynasty, that inserted outside observers into the tumultous history of China from the fall of the Ming dynasty up to the rise of the People’s Republic.

He was often described as the author who did for China what James Clavell did for Japan (although that rather ignores Clavell’s multiple China works), and it’s certainly true that there were many times when his was the only China-specific material you could find on the bookshelves at the average WH Smiths. “Fiery, witty, kind and generous in equal measure,” write his family, “he was a loving rather, grandfather, brother and uncle.” One hopes that the various newspapers that carried his acclaimed journalism for so many decades might get around to memorialising him, rather than leaving it to his relatives to wedge in a paid advertisement of his lifelong achievements.