Eric Silver was born in Leeds in 1935. After studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and working in provincial journalism, he joined The Guardian in 1960. He served successively as copy editor, reporter, industrial correspondent and gossip columnist and covered sports at the weekend. In 1967, he came to Israel to cover the aftermath of the Six-Day War before being posted to Jerusalem as staff correspondent for The Guardian and The Observer in 1972. Over the next 11 years, he covered the Yom Kippur War, two smaller wars in Lebanon and the Israeli-Egyptian peace negotiations. He was Guardian correspondent in India 1984-87, then returned to Jerusalem as a freelance, filing among others for The Independent, The Jewish Chronicle (London), The Jerusalem Report, Time, Maclean’s Magazine (Toronto) and The Statesman (Calcutta). Silver is the author of a biography of Menachem Begin and of the award-winning The Book of the Just. The Unsung Heroes Who Rescued Jews from Hitler. When he came back to the Middle East in 1987, a colleague told him the story was dying. Six months later the first intifada broke out. Silver worked non stop until he unexpectedly took ill early in 2008 and died two months later.