His genius was not just in taking on powerful vested interests, but also in articulating the dreams and frustrations of millions.
Never afraid to speak his mind or challenge authority, he matched a campaigning, radical zeal with a love for the hurly-burly of political intrigue and hot gossip.
The death on Wednesday of Sir Harold Evans, aged 92, represents the end of an era.
The son of a railway stoker and fireman, he emerged from the back streets of Manchester to become one of the great newspaper editors of our time — possibly the greatest at least according to a poll of his peers in 2002.
The death on Wednesday of Sir Harold Evans, aged 92, represents the end of an era. He is pictured above in 1979
Fearless and determined, he made The Sunday Times into the most influential and envied newspaper in the world. For 16 years, his crusading journalism set a bar so high few rivals, if any, could come close.
In an era before the internet, the stories his newspaper broke set the agenda unlike any others.
Under his watch, The Sunday Times exposed Kim Philby as a Soviet spy, published the outrageous diaries of the former Labour minister Richard Crossman, risking prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, and exposed the swindling insurance tycoon Emil Savundra.
But his most celebrated campaign was on behalf of the children blighted by Thalidomide, the morning sickness drug which left many with severe birth defects.
For eight years, Evans pursued Distillers, the manufacturers of the drug, through the courts, and setback after setback, before final vindication and a £28 million payout for the victims’ families.
He is pictured above with his second wife Tina Brown. From the mid-Eighties through to the millennium, they were the golden couple
And, at all times, he presided over his newspaper with an unrivalled combination of brilliance, ruthlessness and a down-to-earth charm that owed much to that working-class upbringing and the values of self-improvement instilled by his parents.
Even in later years, when he brilliantly reinvented himself as a pre-eminent publisher and book editor in New York, he never lost his soft Mancunian twang.
Former colleagues talk of Evans as an inspiring figure. ‘He was always on the lookout for a fight with the biggest and highest people in the land,’ one person recalled. ‘But it was never politically motivated.’
The fact is, however, he was far more than a very good editor. In America, with his glamorous second wife Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker magazines, he presided over a glittering, intellectual salon fizzing with ideas and interesting people.
From the mid-Eighties through to the millennium, they were the golden couple. Their Manhattan home, from where until very recently he would walk nine blocks to his office — after his morning swim, a habit he began 50 years ago — was a hothouse for some of the brightest names in literature and current affairs.
As president and publisher of the vast Random House book conglomerate he secured Marlon Brando’s memoirs and edited one of Norman Mailer’s books that was so big, Evans joked, when he took it on a plane he had to declare excess baggage.
He was behind one of the publishing sensations of the Nineties — Primary Colors, the novelisation of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. It was Sir Harry who came up with the original idea to describe its author — a political journalist — on the cover as ‘Anonymous’. It was a huge international bestseller.
Along the way, Evans edited three books by the great American statesman Henry Kissinger and the life story of former Gulf War general-turned-politician Colin Powell.
Another hit was publishing Donald Trump’s 1997 book The Art Of The Comeback. As an adopted New Yorker, Evans knew Trump well.
‘He was a genial fellow-about-town, you know?’ he observed three years ago. ‘He wasn’t an ogre. He wasn’t what he became.’
He also published a book by an unknown senator from Illinois called Barack Obama. Dreams From My Father became a huge bestseller and helped usher in the Obama presidency.
Then, at the age of 89, Evans made it on to the bestseller lists himself with Do I Make Myself Clear?, a brilliant guide to good writing.
Throughout his life he had a deep and abiding love for America, but never turned his back on his British roots. He became a U.S. citizen in 1993 and was knighted for services to journalism in 2004.
To underline that love for the U.S., he wrote two seminal books, probably his best known, The American Century in 1998 and its 2004 sequel, They Made America.
Fortune magazine described the second volume as one of the best books in 75 years.
It was later adapted as a four- part TV mini-series.
Considering he had lived in New York since 1984, and that so much of the Fleet Street he had known and loved had disappeared, it is remarkable that Evans remained such a giant of the British newspaper world to the end of his days.
Born in Eccles, to a railwayman father and a mother who ran a grocery shop out of the family home, Evans’s background was no guarantee of the stellar success he was to enjoy.
He left school at 16 and got a job as a reporter on a local weekly paper. After National Service in the RAF, he went to night school to educate himself. It paid off and he won a place at Durham University, going on to work for the Manchester Evening News before, in 1961, being appointed editor of The Northern Echo.
It was there that he gained a reputation for campaigning journalism, including demands for smear tests to detect cervical cancer which led to national screening.
His most celebrated campaign was on behalf of the children blighted by Thalidomide, the morning sickness drug which left many with severe birth defects
Six years later, in 1967, he was appointed editor of The Sunday Times where an early task was to set up the paper’s famous Insight investigations team.
He embodied the romantic idea of an editor — dogged and tireless in the pursuit of truth and, in the Distillers battles, justice. For all the scoops he oversaw, it was Thalidomide that was his greatest accomplishment and put his name in lights.
But he also adored the minutiae of editing a newspaper, writing the headlines, choosing impactful pictures and staying at the office late into the night when the paper was printed.
In 1981, after the Times titles were bought by Rupert Murdoch, he was offered the editorship of The Times and took it. ‘My ambition got the better of my judgment,’ he wrote in memoir Good Times, Bad Times.
The two men clashed over Evans’ failure to fully back then prime minister Margaret Thatcher and, after a mere six months as editor, Evans was sacked the day after returning to the office from his father’s funeral.
In recent times, he has described losing that post as the greatest regret of his life. It could, of course, have been the end of his career but that was not to be.
The irrepressible Evans — always Harry to his friends — reinvented himself in America, the country that loves to give a man a second chance.
By now, he had a younger wife 26 years his junior. He was already married to Enid and a father of three when, in 1977, he met a brilliant young Oxford undergraduate called Tina Brown, whose agent had submitted some of her writing to him.
He gave her a job and, a year later, realised he was falling in love with her. He later declared it an ‘absurd state of affairs’. He divorced Enid and, in 1981, Tina and Harry were married at the Long Island home of the then Washington Post supremo Ben Bradlee.
As a media couple, they had no parallel. Harry now was happy to take something of a backseat as Tina began her whirlwind climb in magazines. When she became editor of the venerable New Yorker, he declared: ‘I am so proud of her.’
He even chuckled when waspish gossip columnists dubbed him ‘Mr Harold Brown’. Not an envious man, he rejoiced in his wife’s success.
He was devoted to her and their children, George and Isabel.
On Twitter, Ms Brown said that her husband was ‘the most magical of men’ and ‘my soulmate for 39 years’.
As old age took a grip, Evans, always a wiry figure, refused to slow down. A fitness fanatic, he took up skiing in his 40s and played squash and tennis into his 80s. He once competed in the English Open Championships in table tennis.
While Covid and lockdown in New York meant he was unable to enjoy his daily swim, he never lost that enthusiasm for news and what made the world tick.
More than anything, he loved being at the ringside of history.