Miles did national service in the Royal Navy and studied Russian. In 1960, he studied Arabic at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies in Lebanon.
He married Julia Lyndall Weiner, a social worker and sister of Edmund Weiner (deputy Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary) in 1968. They live in Oxford and have four children: three sons (1972, 1973 and 1977) - including the journalist and author Hugh Miles - and one daughter (1979).
After two years' secondment at the Northern Ireland Office in Belfast he became the first Director-General of the Joint Directorate for Overseas Trade Services, a new unit set up to improve British Government services to exporters, and travelled widely both in Britain and abroad. At the same time he was a non-executive Director of Vickers Defence Systems.
From 1993 to 1996 Miles was Ambassador to Greece.
He is a deputy chairman of the Libyan British Business Council, set up with the approval of the British and Libyan Governments to promote trade and investment. He has been a regular visitor to the Middle East and to the former Soviet Union (including in recent years as an election observer) since 1958.
In the past four years he has written a long series of articles that were published in The Guardian. His latest article entitled "The long road to normalisation" asked rhetorically whether the recently signed compensation agreement between the United States and Libya will work. The article concluded:
The most important compensation issue, Lockerbie, has been settled on the basis that Libya agreed to hand over two suspects for trial in the Scottish courts and to accept responsibility for their actions. One was acquitted, the other convicted, but his conviction has been called into question by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. There is the possibility of a retrial, and it remains to be seen what effect that might have on the Libya/America soap opera.
On 22 November 2009, Miles published an article in the Independent on Sunday, in which he questioned the appointment of two British historians to the Iraq inquiry panel because of their Jewish background and previous support for Israel. Some commentators have described Miles's article as "blatantly anti-semitic".
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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