Peter Millar

Peter Millar (22 February 1955 – 21 January 2023) was a Northern Irish journalist, critic and author, primarily known for his reporting of the later days of the Cold War and fall of the Berlin Wall. Early life Millar was born in Bangor, Co Down and educated at Bangor Central Primary School and Bangor Grammar School, then Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read French and Russian. Career Millar was hired by Reuters in 1976 and worked in London and Brussels before being sent from Fleet Street to East Berlin by the news agency, where in the early 1980s he was the only non-German correspondent. Millar also reported on the Solidarity movement in Poland before moving to Warsaw and then Moscow. He joined The Daily Telegraph before in 1985 moving to the Sunday Telegraph, whose editor Peregrine Worsthorne agreed to Millar's suggestion to give him the role of Central Europe Correspondent: "I persuaded him to let me style myself Central Europe Correspondent, thereby not just inventing a job but revitalising a term – Central Europe – that had been current for centuries but dormant since the onset of the Cold War and the continent's split down an ideological fault line". In 1989, in the run-up to the final stages of The Cold War, Millar moved to The Sunday Times. He was arrested in East Berlin during demonstrations during Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's visit for East Germany's 40th anniversary parades, and was interrogated by the Stasi before being expelled from East Germany. Two weeks later Millar returned to Berlin, however, to witness and report on the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe. One passage Millar wrote for a Sunday Times article, about events as they unfolded in Prague, was subsequently quoted in its entirety in Martin Gilbert's A History of the Twentieth Century.