"Born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, Andrew Lycett lived in East Africa (Tanganyika) until he was eight, and then in Yorkshire, Dublin and Sussex.
He was educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford, where he read Modern History and edited Cherwell, the university newspaper.
After graduating, he travelled in and began writing about India. Some of his earliest articles appeared in the Illustrated Weekly of India and the Rising Nepal. He also worked briefly for a development agency in newly independent Bangladesh. In the mid-1970s he returned to Africa and later spent considerable time in the Middle East, working in both areas as a foreign correspondent, mainly for The Times and Sunday Times. Over a period of twenty years he also edited several magazines and other publications dealing primarily with the Arab world. He acted as a consultant to the Economist Intelligence Unit and was a contributing editor of GQ.
As a result of regular visits to Libya, he wrote his first book, 'Qaddafi and the Libyan Revolution' (with his Sunday Times colleague, the late David Blundy). This was published in Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1987 and in the United States by Little, Brown in 1988.
Since the mid-1990s, he has concentrated on writing non-fiction books, mainly biographies. His 'Ian Fleming', published in 1995, is the definitive life of James Bond's creator. Reviewing it in the Sunday Telegraph, Selina Hastings, herself a celebrated biographer, wrote, 'This is an exemplary biography, beautifully written, fast-paced and extremely perceptive.'"