Life
Life
Derek Taylor grew up amid the coal-fields of Nottinghamshire, in a house just round the corner from where D.H.Lawrence had lived. He was the first in his family to go to university, and at Oxford he read Law and History. He also discovered journalism there, and became Editor of the Univerity newspaper. That led to a job with Independent Television News.
As a TV correspondent, he reported from Northern Ireland, Rome, the Middle East, South Africa and the United States, where he was based in Washington D.C. He became ITN’s first Middle East correspondent, and covered five wars. He also spent seven months in Iran during the Islamic revolution.
For three of those months, he was on assignment for ABC News of America after the Iranian authorities had expelled all US passport-holders (a time and place portrayed in the film Argo). During this period, his daily reports for ABC’s Nightline
were the only Tehran-based TV coverage of the American hostage crisis to reach U.S. viewers.
"I discovered it sometimes pays to be frightened," Derek confesses.
He served for three years as a Royal Television Society Journalism Awards judge, then went on to work for the BBC. He became a Director of Price Waterhouse before taking over as Chief Executive of the world’s biggest TV news agency owned by The Associated Press of America.
He now lives with his wife, Maggie in Plymouth on the south coast of England, where he pursues his first love: history. He's had five books published. Two of them Magna Carta, the Places that Shaped the Great Carter and his latest, England from a Side-saddle have topped Amazon's history best-seller list.
