For him, the best form of rest was hard work of a different kind.But alongside his extensive professional activities, Lavrencic also found time to relax - preferably over his favourite red wine. I remember joining him for a lunchtime drink at the BBC Club before I was due to go on a reporting trip to Slovenia at the time of the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. He was already seated, sharing a bottle of wine with a colleague. My arrival prompted an order for another bottle; more was to follow as other friends were invited to the table. It was a memorably convivial occasion; but I learnt more about Slovenia from Karl Lavrencic in one hour than from days of research and interviewing.Wide-ranging interests in the world were linked in Lavrencic's case to an encyclopaedic knowledge of his native Slovenia and the rest of the old Yugoslavia. Long before independence became a reality in 1991, he never gave up the hope of seeing democracy established in Slovenia. Yet regardless of his views about Tito's Communist-ruled Yugoslavia, he was always fair and balanced in his reporting.

He was prepared to acknowledge the regime's achievements as much as to expose its many failings.The young Lavrencic encountered the rival political ideologies of the 20th century in the brutal circumstances of war. Born Drago Lavrencic in 1921, he was only 20 when, following the German-led invasion of Yugoslavia, Slovenia was partitioned between Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. Soon afterwards he was put on a train to be transported to an Italian detention camp along with other intellectuals and students. Tito's Communist partisans ambushed the train, freed the detainees - and then promptly forced them to join their "liberators".

Lavrencic had no time either for the partisans' political orientation or their incessant squabbling. He escaped from their clutches at the earliest opportunity.It was not to be his last escape. At the end of the war, when Tito came to power in Yugoslavia, Lavrencic, by then a practising lawyer, was briefly arrested as part of a round-up of non-Communist professionals. Soon after his release, in 1946, he fled to Austria where he found refuge in the British occupation zone. There a combination of sheer determination, self-confidence and luck set him on a path that would lead to a new life in Britain.One day Lavrencic came across some British officers who were looking for a Russian interpreter to help them gain access to a saw-mill just inside the Soviet zone. Lavrencic spoke no Russian but quickly found out the Russian word for saw-mill: "lesopilka".

By dint of repeating that magic word, together with a barrage of Slovene phrases, some of which resembled Russian, as well as using sign language, he managed to make himself understood. That performance earned him a steady job as a British army interpreter - and subsequently a passage to Britain. In the process he learnt Russian to such a high standard that later he was to broadcast in that language.Lavrencic's remarkable aptitude for languages was helped by being brought up in a bilingual family where Slovene and German were equally well spoken. At school he acquired French, a language that later in life he had plenty of opportunities to practise at his holiday home in central France During the wartime occupation he learnt Italian. And he taught himself Spanish to while away the time on board an East German cargo ship that was transporting a consignment of old British buses to Cuba during the blockade of the early 1960s. Portuguese was to become another language in which he would conduct interviews.In post-war Britain, Lavrencic had an astonishing variety of jobs - farm labourer, lecturer to foreign workers and Encyclopaedia Britannica salesman.