John Bamber has written this obituary of Vlad:

A couple of weeks ago BBC colleagues at Bush House and Newsnight were saddened to learn of the death last October of one of their more colourful and charismatic fellows, VLAD ROYAN. He was 92 and had suffered a series of strokes in recent months. He spent the last eight months of his life in a care home.

He will be remembered for his forensic mind, prodigious gift for languages, resilience and above all for his sometimes caustic wit.

It has been said of Vlad that he was the classic Mitteleuropa type, sadly vanished from London, Paris, Tel Aviv, Prague and Vienna, now living on in memory, fiction and fantasy.

Vladimir Milan Rojan was born in Zagreb on 22 March 1922. He changed the spelling of his surname when he came to the United Kingdom.

Vlado was born into a prominent Jewish family. His father was a chemical engineer. Vlad used to say that he felt comforted by the sound of the first trams thundering past the family apartment at five o'clock in the morning.

When he was born Zagreb was part of the newly-formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia.  Until 1918 it had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Vlad followed in his father's footsteps and studied chemistry for one year at Zagreb University.

In April 1941, when Vlad was 19, the Axis Powers invaded Yugoslavia and his life changed forever.  The family were interned for several months in a town outside the Italian city of Verona.  When Mussolini fell in the summer of 1943, the Rojans went into hiding in Perugia for fear of being taken to a concentration camp. Vlad was taken in by the Jesuits and passed himself off as a schoolboy from Naples. He rapidly became sufficiently fluent in Italian to be able to mask his true origins and survive under the radar. One year later, in 1944, when Italy was liberated by allied forces, Vlad joined the Yugoslav Army and later became an interpreter for the British Army with the rank of lieutenant. He was decommissioned in 1946, and was subsequently promoted to captain. He stayed on with British Army Intelligence Reserve until 1948.

In the British Army he became lifelong friends with Edward Roberts, who later married Vlad's younger sister Ingeborg. Robbie, as he was known, brought Vlado, Inge and their mother to Britain, which became his home for the rest of his life. He became a naturalised British citizen in 1950.  Vlad did not return to Zagreb until after the Berlin Wall fell more than 40 years later.

Vlad joined the BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham in about 1947, and stayed there for only a couple of years before moving to the BBC External Services in Bush House.

In 1956 he met Felicita (Felicie) Richtiger in the BBC canteen. Felicie was born in Antwerp, where her parents had moved from Lodz in Poland in the early 1920s to escape the pogroms.  Vlad and Felicie married within the year and were together for more than half a century.  The marriage almost got off to a rocky start on the honeymoon. Vlad went to the casino in Deauville and virtually lost his shirt. He saved the day by putting his last few francs on the roulette wheel, and won enough to pay the hotel bill for a week.

Vlad and Felicie had one child, Caroline Nicole, Nicky, of whom he was so proud. She graduated in medicine and married a fellow doctor, Padraic Ryan. They had two children, Julian and Flora, on whom Vlad doted.

Vlad spent a couple of years in Audience Research and then moved to the Newsroom, later being promoted to Duty Editor.

Colleagues say that his forensic intellect and gift for piecing together intelligence lifted the run-of-the-mill "X went to Y bearing a message from Z" off the page, placing these stories in context and making them interesting.

When Vlad left Croatia it was in the grip of the Ustashe, who persecuted Serbs, Jews and gypsies. He was a passionate defender of Israel and disliked Germans and Arabs with a vengeance. A colleague said he also defended the Serbs since they had treated the Jews marginally better.

On one occasion a rather diffident German sub-editor who made the mistake of admitting that he had been in the Hitlerjugend at the V1 rocket base at Peenemunde, and anxiously wishing to prove his pro-British credentials, was buying a round in the bar. Vlad said "Still paying reparations I see, Rudi."

Any Arab sympathy was ruthlessly pounced upon.  One day a junior editor was sporting a keffiyah. Vlad ordered him to remove it or he would not be given any more work. When the young man did so, he revealed an ear-stud, which further enraged Vlad.  He instructed the poor bloke to take it off, which he rightly refused to do. The next day he was wearing ostentatious dangly turquoise ear-rings lent to him by a female colleague. Vlad had the good grace to laugh.

Any female colleague seen talking to Arabs was immediately dubbed "Fatima". On one occasion the women got together and bought him a Private Eye Male Chauvinist Pig tie. He was curiously proud of it, and used to wear it to BBC functions.  Vlad had a strange habit. Whenever a Tannoy announcement was made which was not to his liking he would snap pencils and throw them in the air.  On some shifts he was marooned in a sea of yellow.

Unfortunately, Vlad's intransigent opinions lost him some friends.

Vlad's wit was legendary.  Asked how a BBC farewell party had gone, he said "It was marvellous. Nobody had a good word to say about anybody."  Vlad's acid wit extended into the home.  Told by his grandson, Julian, that David Beckham had called his daughter "Harper Seven", Vlad said "What a stupid name! That's even worse than Padraic!"

When he had to retire from Bush Newsroom at the statutory age of 60, Vlad went to Newsnight as a copytaster working on 12-hour shifts.  This he did for the next 15 years, finally hanging up his pencil at 75, as Julian says, "after a lifetime of dedication to a job he cherished, which was an outlet for his political passion."

Vlad was very elegant. The word "dapper" was coined for him. In his Television Centre days we would eat in the upmarket restaurant there. During our two-hour lunches we would enjoy a bottle of wine and speak Serbo-Croat, which he otherwise rarely did. I used to delight in translating literally various English idioms. I recall Vlad almost choking on his steak when I said "Going the whole hog."

Vlad maintained a passionate and broad-ranging interest in politics. He was surrounded at his home in Marylebone by newspapers with completed Times crosswords and Sudoku puzzles. Vlad loved music, especially opera, and philosophy. He read biographies, but also liked watching snooker on the television.

His mind remained sharp until the end.

Vlad was above all a family man.

As Julian said in his tribute, "You could not write history better."

Vlad Royan was a remarkable person whom his colleagues will long remember.