There is more than one author with this name Richard West was a British journalist and author best known for his reporting of the Vietnam War and Yugoslavia. Born in London, West attended Marlborough College before his national service spell in Trieste awakened a lifelong interest in Yugoslavia. Starting off his journalistic career at the Manchester Guardian, West became a foreign correspondent in Yugoslavia, Africa, Central America and Indochina. Described by Neal Ascherson as the "paragon of the independent journalist for his generation", he would spend much of the next two decades in Vietnam, Africa and eastern Europe, where he was codenamned Agent Friday by Communist Poland's secret police. Among his books are The Making of the Prime Minister (with Anthony Howard),[4] An English Journey (1981) and Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia (1995). Along with Patrick Marnham and Auberon Waugh, West was one of three signatories to a letter to The Times that called for a British monument to honour those repatriated as a result of the Yalta Conference; it was eventually erected in 1986.