David Pryce-Jones, a British writer "whose world-spanning interests, balanced by a rock-ribbed opposition to communism and support for the state of Israel, made him a powerful and longstanding conservative voice in Britain and the United States," died November 17, the New York Times reported. He was 89. His essays and dispatches could frequently be found in right-leaning publications in Britain like the Telegraph and the Spectator, as well as the New Criterion and National Review in the U.S.
"He was a man of the right, but he was quite broad in his social circle," said Daniel Johnson, a writer and the editor of TheArticle, an online journal, "as long as he didn't feel you were betraying the deep values of Western civilization."
Pryce-Jones wrote 10 novels and 18 works of nonfiction, including biographies, travelogues, and histories. Among his nonfiction works are a biography of Graham Greene; a travelogue about Israel; political analysis, particularly of the Arab world; and two memoirs, including Signatures: Literary Encounters of a Lifetime (2020), a series of character sketches of people who had inscribed books to him.
"He had an expansive humanity about him," said Roger Kimball, who, as editor of the New Criterion and Encounter Books, published much of his later work. "He knew how the world worked."
Noting that Pryce-Jones "seemed to have known everyone," the Times wrote that he "counted Saul Bellow, William F. Buckley Jr., and the British American historian Robert Conquest among his friends. When the writer V.S. Naipaul received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, he invited Mr. Pryce-Jones and his wife, Clarissa, to be his guests at the award ceremony in Stockholm."
Pryce-Jones's critics, "of whom there were many, accused him of essentialism and racial stereotyping, reducing the breadth of the Middle Eastern world to an extreme interpretation of Islam held by a small minority," the Times added.
He published his first novel, Owls and Satyrs, in 1961, and by 1963 was working as a freelance writer. "There used to be a type like David Pryce-Jones," writer Jay Nordlinger said. "They were mainly British. They were generalists. They kind of knew everything. There aren't people like that anymore."