David Porter was a prolific writer, editor, moralist, lecturer and journalist, whose intellectual curiosity, suffused with wit and humour, was irrepressible and highly infectious.
His 36 or so books, which indicate his wide concerns, include 13 ghost-written for others, such as Rita Nightingale (imprisoned for drug-smuggling in Thailand), Charles Fraser-Smith (the original ‘Q’ of the James Bond movies), Harry Bagnell (vicar of Port Stanley during the Argentine invasion), Bishop Lazlo Tokes of Romania (instigator of the 1989 revolution), Ram Gidoomal (entrepreneur, academic and politician), and Nigel Goodwin (pioneer in evangelical involvement in the arts and media).
His own books range in subject from biographies (Malcolm Muggeridge, Mother Teresa) to social issues (such as the nurture of children, voting and politics, and the arts and faith). In addition, he wrote accomplished poetry (collected as Sunday with the New Elizabethans) and fiction (The Vienna Passage). His future writing plans were to have included a popular biography of John Stott (whom he greatly admired), and a comparative study of Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, and certainly much more.
