At school he discovered a taste for history and his facility for languages, adding German and Italian to the English and French that he spoke at home. He maintained that his education turned him 'from a Greek in England into a Greek Englishman'. In 1926 he sat the Eton scholarship examinations and was placed second – making him possibly the only Etonian with two great-grandfathers who had been slaves. When he was three months old, they moved to Liverpool, and he grew up in a community of prosperous, English-speaking Greek families. His parents were Greek (hailing from the Greek island of Chios, off the Turkish coast) and Peter's father was a merchant in the family business. He had been a barrister, a publisher, an academic and a journalist and, after Bletchley, he had assisted the prosecution at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

Yet author and historian were only two of his job descriptions. Its 845 pages were a tribute to his lifelong energy, formidable memory and powers of analysis. By his 96th birthday he had published his 20th book, the ninth edition of his World Politics Since 1945. International affairs was an abiding interest. Peter Calvocoressi, who has died aged 97, was best known as an Ultra intelligence analyst at the Bletchley Park codebreaking centre in Buckinghamshire during the second world war, but this episode represented only four years in a long career with many different aspects.

Peter calvocoressi world politics