Emile Joseph Dillon was an author, journalist and linguist.
Background
The son of an Irish father and an English mother, Dillon initially trained for the priesthood. However, he abandoned all plans for a career in the church when he was 21, and immersed himself in the study of Oriental languages at the Collège de France in Paris.
Education
He later was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Leipzig, and obtained two further doctorates, in Oriental Languages and Literature from the Catholic University of Leuven, and in Comparative Philology from the University of Kharkiv.
Career
He was Russian correspondent of The Daily Telegraph from 1887 to 1914 and, for a short time, was professor of Sanskrit, Classical Armenian, and Comparative Philology at the University of Kharkiv. He also reported the Dreyfus trial of 1899, the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and the Versailles peace conference in 1919. When working as a journalist, Dillon would occasionally disguise himself in order to be able to observe the action from closer quarters, as was the case when he was sent by The Daily Telegraph to report on the Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1894-1895.
They divorced in 1913.
In later life he made his home in Barcelona, where he died in 1933 as a result of complications following a major surgical operation. An archive collection of papers of Dillon is held in the National Library of Scotland (Acc12382).