Robin Winks, 72; Professor, Author, Historian of the British Empire, Authority on Espionage

Robin Winks, a Yale historian of the British Empire and an authority on international espionage, has died. He was 72.

Winks died Monday at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut of complications from a stroke.

In five decades of teaching at Yale, Winks wrote 30 books and was a favorite lecturer for his colorful approach and intellectual energy.

He was an expert on the history of Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and traveled to most former British colonies to soak up local history and culture.

His passion for mysteries led him to write several books on espionage and detective fiction.

A 1987 Pulitzer-nominated book, “Cloak and Gown: Scholars in America’s Secret War,” exposed the way U.S. spy agencies recruited agents from the Ivy League.

In that book, Winks said the Office of Strategic Services, and later the CIA, plumbed Yale because it was rife with the “idiosyncratic individual, the person of odd curiosity and distinctive knowledge, the freewheeling thinker who went past tested systems and conventional wisdom to the untried.”

The son of teachers, Winks was a native of West Lafayette, Ind. He moved extensively with his parents during the Depression before settling in Colorado.

He was a 1952 magna cum laude graduate of the University of Colorado, where he also earned a master’s degree in ethnography.

A Fulbright scholar in New Zealand, he received a master’s degree in Maori studies at Victoria University there and, in 1957, a doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins University.

Winks started teaching at Yale in 1957. He rose in the academic ranks and chaired the history department from 1996 to 1998.

Survivors include his wife, Avril Flockton Winks; two children; and two grandchildren.