Peter Paterson, who presented The World Tonight and worked on several other Radio 4 programmes has died.  This obituary is taken from the Daily Telegraph:

Peter Paterson
7:14PM BST 18 Jul 2011

Peter Paterson, who died on July 17 aged 80, was an accomplished Fleet Street industrial and political reporter, a mainstay of the New Statesman and the Spectator, an articulate broadcaster, and for almost 20 years television critic of the Daily Mail.

He pulled off numerous journalistic coups. Taking PIA's inaugural flight to Shanghai in 1963, Paterson interviewed Zhou Enlai who told him China was about to explode its first atom bomb. In Washington he talked his way into the office of the Teamsters' leader Jimmy Hoffa, spending two days with him as he scorned "Booby" Kennedy. He even became friendly with Alger Hiss, the former US diplomat denounced as a Communist agent; Paterson was convinced that Hiss – whom he took to a Spectator lunch – was "an American Dreyfus".

Paterson hobnobbed with giants of the labour movement: Frank Cousins, Jack Jones, Joe Gormley and the rest. Some were Communists, but Soviet bloc diplomats who invited Paterson to lunch hoping to "turn" him were told: "If you decide to defect, I will give you any help I can."

Indeed, he became convinced that the national press was being dragged to ruin by the print unions, and in 1974 attempted to launch a daily paper of his own: the Globe. He sounded out potential backers but was forced to drop the plan when funds proved scarce.

Soon after he made news himself, as a survivor of the Moorgate disaster: the crash of a Tube train into a dead-end tunnel on February 28 1975 killed 43 people outright, several more dying later.

Paterson – on his way to interview Tony Benn – got into the second carriage at Highbury & Islington, the first being full. As the train neared Moorgate he felt it "leap forward. It seemed to me as if it was going off the rails."

It careered through the station, ploughed through a set of buffers and slammed into the end of the tunnel. Paterson came round in a dark, cramped, dusty space: "I tried to stand up and bumped my head on the roof". The Daily Telegraph unwittingly carried his picture on page three, a soot-blackened figure captioned "I'm alive! I'm alive!".

Peter James Paterson was born on February 4 1931 to Katherine Paterson, a Glasgow girl who fled to London when she became pregnant and gave the baby to her sister and husband in Manor Park. When Peter was four, his aunt put him into Spurgeon's Orphan Home at Balham, where he became "Boy No 14 in House No 8".

The regime was rough but he gained the basics of an education, delivered in a "crude but effective" way; no boy left Spurgeon's unable to read and write. When war broke out, the Home was evacuated to Redhill, but in 1944 V2 attacks led to the orphans being sent further afield. Now 13, Peter, was evacuated to Cwmllynfell, a mining village inland from Neath. When he first heard Welsh being spoken, he thought he had been captured by the Germans. But he came to regard Cwmllynfell, and the mountains above it, as "pure heaven".

Peter returned to the orphanage after six months, then left at 14 with "a new suit, 10 shillings and a Bible". From Tooting School of Commerce he became a clerk at an electric cable company. Then, at 17, he joined the Fulham Gazette as a 25s-a-week reporter, his only qualifications "a puppy-dog enthusiasm and an ability to write shorthand".

In the Army from 1949, Paterson was sent to the Whitehall headquarters of the Brussels Treaty (the forerunner of Nato), working for Montgomery's chief of staff, Gen David Belchem. He took dictation from "Monty", and flew with him to Paris, where General Eisenhower – whom he met several times – was co-ordinating plans to counter a Soviet invasion of western Europe.

Paterson returned to journalism with the Western Daily Press in Bristol, where Tom Stoppard was a colleague. In 1954 he joined the Exchange Telegraph agency as a parliamentary reporter, covering the epic debates on the death penalty and Suez. He joined The Daily Telegraph in 1958, switching to the industrial beat two years later and to The Sunday Telegraph in 1962.

While there he was hired by Paul Johnson to write a column for the Statesman, in 1968 becoming assistant editor. He later became deputy editor to Anthony Howard, and was regarded as heir-apparent, but when the Statesman ran into financial difficulties he was sacked and joined the Spectator as a contributor under Alexander Chancellor.
Freelancing, he was much in demand at Radio 4 and also presented Granada's What the Papers Say. Years later, Sidney Bernstein offered him a job overseeing not only Granada's television output but also its motorway catering; Paterson concluded that he had taken leave of his senses.

Paterson wrote on many subjects, but most frequently on industrial relations. He had barely finished chronicling the end of the miners' strike in 1985 when the Daily Mail appointed him industrial editor; two years later he became its television critic. The job lacked the conviviality of industrial reporting, and he became convinced that the standard of television was deteriorating yearly, with Big Brother the nadir. But he consoled himself that the worse the programme, the better the review.

While at the Mail, Paterson published Tired and Emotional (1993), an acclaimed and highly entertaining biography of George Brown. Its verve left colleagues regretting that he had not chronicled the lives of the more colourful union leaders he had known. His autobiography Much More of This, Old Boy? – Scenes from A Reporter's Life was published on his 80th birthday.

Peter Paterson was married four times. His wife, two daughters, and a son, also a journalist, survive him.