OLDER COLLEAGUES at this newspaper recall when Monday-morning meetings involved squeezing into the editor’s office at The Economist Tower. Standing by the doorway, stooped in thought, would be a modest man gently ready to pipe up to challenge conventional wisdom. And to offer big ideas.

John Parker had lots of them. He wrote sweepingly about the post-communist transformation of Europe and how China’s reforms would change history. He was an early observer of American polarisation. He had a genius for highlighting demographic megatrends: how to feed 9bn people by 2050, how cities keep reinventing themselves. He had a twinkly talent for capturing the zeitgeist, explaining, for example, why 2019 would be the year of the vegan.

As well as big ideas, he had big jobs, over a 45-year career that included an interlude as op-ed-page editor at the Financial Times. He opened The Economist’s Moscow bureau (covering Mikhail Gorbachev’s revolution), was our Washington bureau chief at the time of the attacks of September 11th 2001, and became Beijing bureau chief to explain the dramatic changes under Xi Jinping. Between front-line reporting were stints as editor for Europe, business, books, the environment and globalisation.

Lately, John was an editor-at-large, living in Dorset with his wife Kerry, whom he met 37 years ago on the New York subway. He wrote—and eagerly rewrote—a course on international relations for Economist Education. At a time of global upheaval the world has, sadly, lost one of the people best able to interpret momentous change. ■