Educated at Downside School and Christ Church, Oxford, Sykes was, for a time in his youth, in the Foreign Office, including a stint as an attaché in the British Embassy in Berlin, where Harold Nicolson was then Counsellor. This was followed by a year at the British Legation in Teheran. An early hero was Aubrey Herbert, remembered now as the man who inspired John Buchan's classic thriller, Greenmantle. Though Sykes thought of making politics his career, his stammer and also his artistic and imaginative disposition indicated that political life was not for him. At the School of Oriental Studies in London, he devoted himself to Persian studies in 1933 before travelling in Central Asia during 1933–34 with Robert Byron, who later wrote The Road to Oxiana recounting their long expedition in what was then an almost unexplored country. In the book, Byron states that Sykes was given an order to leave Persia, but they could negotiate that he leaves via Afghanistan with Byron. On their return to England, Sykes and Byron wrote a novel together under the name of Richard Waughburton, Innocence and Design, published in 1935. A little later, Sykes and Cyril Connolly planned a book with the title of The Little Voice. In common with other projects of Connolly's, the book never got beyond the planning stages. Sykes published in 1936 a biography of the German Persianist Wilhelm Wassmus; he did not, during later years, include this volume in his list of his publications. A memoir of Byron, killed at sea in 1941, was included in Sykes' best-selling book, Four Studies in Loyalty. Sykes had an eventful war. Having held, like his famous father, a Territorial Army commission in The Green Howards in 1927–30, he was commissioned in 1939 as a reserve officer in the regiment's newly formed 7th Battalion. In June 1940, Sykes joined SO1, where he was personal assistant to Colonel Cudbert Thornhill. In October 1941, Sykes was sent out to Tehran as Deputy Director of Special Propaganda under diplomatic cover in the aftermath of the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, where he remained until November 1942, when he was transferred to Cairo. Out of a job because his department had been wound up, Sykes found time to write a light novel, High Minded Murder, something of a roman à clef, set in wartime Cairo where Graham Greene's sister Elizabeth was living. Meanwhile, after failing to find any position as an intelligence officer in the Middle East, Sykes returned to the UK in May 1943, volunteered for the Special Air Service, and was posted to the Commando Training Depot at Achnacarry Castle, Invernesshire on 1 July 1943. As an SAS officer, Sykes, who spoke fluent French but could not pass as a native, undertook extremely hazardous work with the French Resistance: an experience which, like his friendship with Byron, was depicted in Four Studies in Loyalty, this time in that book's last chapter. Sykes will be especially remembered for his 1975 memoir, the biography of his friend Evelyn Waugh. While both had attended Oxford, but a few years remote from each other, Sykes and Waugh met after the success of Vile Bodies, 1930. He introduced Waugh, as a matter of course, to Lady Diana Cooper. Waugh would create one of his great personalities drawn from her characteristics and ways, Julia Stitch, in Scoop, 1938. Sykes praised Brideshead, Waugh's Catholic epic; the two were both Catholics, but with the notable difference—mentioned by Waugh's son Auberon when reviewing Sykes's book in the November 1975 issue of Books and Bookmen – that whereas Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in his twenties, Sykes was a cradle Catholic. He however admitted to a dislike of the character of Julia Flyte, noting that nobody had yet identified a model for her in contemporary society. Sykes makes some interesting comparisons between scenes in Waugh's books and those of William M Thackeray - the fox hunting scene in a Handful of Dust is compared to that in Barry Lyndon. Sykes is also remembered to a lesser extent, for his history of the British Mandate of Palestine, Crossroads to Israel. He also wrote several books of fiction and lives of Orde Wingate the general sometimes known as the "Lawrence of Judea" ; Lady Astor, who, born in Virginia, was one of the first women to sit in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom; and Adam von Trott zu Solz, executed following his part in the failed 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. After 1945 Sykes worked for many years in BBC Radio, where he helped to get Waugh's broadcast on P G Wodehouse, who was captured in Le Touquet by the Germnas, on air, as well as writing for several British and American periodicals, including The New Republic, The Spectator, Books and Bookmen, The Observer and the short-lived English Review Magazine. He was invested as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Marriage and family
He married Camilla Georgiana, daughter of Sir Thomas Wentworth Russell on 25 October 1936. Their son, Mark Richard Sykes, by his second marriage, is father to six children including New York-based fashion writer and novelist Plum Sykes. Writer and photographer, Christopher Simon Sykes, is a nephew. Writer and journalist Tom Sykes is a grandson.
