Peter Kirk

Sir Peter Michael Kirk, (18 May 1928 – 17 April 1977) was a British writer, broadcaster, Conservative politician, minister in the governments of Alec Douglas-Home and Edward Heath, and leading European Parliamentarian. Early life The elder son and fourth child of Kenneth Escott Kirk (Bishop of Oxford, 1937-1954), Kirk was born in Headington, Oxford, and was educated at Marlborough and at Trinity College, Oxford, where he obtained an MA in modern history having first studied languages (including a period at the University of Bern studying Old High German). He attended the congress in the Hague in 1948 from which the European Movement sprang, and was President of the Oxford Union Society in 1949. Career In the early 1950s he was diplomatic correspondent on the Kemsley Newspapers (part of Ian Fleming's Mercury News Service). He also wrote for The Sunday Times. After his election to Parliament, he continued to write freelance with regular contributions to (among others) The Daily Telegraph, National and English Review, Blackwood's, The Spectator, and Trenton Times (United States), and from 1961, to German press and television. He made documentary films for J. Arthur Rank and frequently broadcast on British radio and television.