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On current conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region, he says that discussion, negotiation and binding third-party arbitration would seem like the best solution.

"The League of Nations arbitrated the Aland Islands dispute; the Vatican arbitrated the Beagle Channel dispute; some neutral party, Norway, perhaps, or Canada might take on the current island arguments between China and her most vexed neighbors."

From early in his journalistic career, Winchester was a globetrotter, and his traveling days are still far from over.

He graduated from St. Catherine's College, Oxford, with a degree in geology in 1966. He then worked for a Canadian mining company in Uganda, and while there, after reading a copy of Coronation Everest by journalist Jan Morris, decided that he, too, wanted to be a journalist.

The book, Winchester wrote in a review many years later, "offers a breathtakingly intimate evocation of the most famous of all mountaineering exploits and of perhaps the last great old-fashioned Fleet Street scoop".

After being rebuffed in his attempts to find work with various newspapers because of a lack of experience, he eventually landed a job as a junior reporter with a newspaper called The Journal in northern England. Since then he has worked on the staff of, or has been a freelancer for, many newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian.