The death has taken place in Co Leitrim of author and journalist Lord Kilbracken of Killegar.
John Godley, who was aged 85, was the author of a number of books, including a biography of the notorious Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren, and Bring Back My Stringbag, an account of his years as a torpedo bomber pilot.
John Kilbracken, as he liked to be called, was also a hereditary peer and an active member of the House of Lords until 1999. He died after a short illness.
His wartime marriage to Penelope Reyne, daughter of an admiral in Britain's Royal Navy, was dissolved in 1948. He later married Susan Heazlewood.
Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, Lord Kilbracken joined the British Fleet Air Arm and became a Swordfish fighter pilot and squadron commander in the second World War. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his part in the Murmansk convoys, flying inside the Arctic Circle to northern Russia.
In more than 50 years in journalism, he wrote for the Tatler, Evening Standard, Daily Express and numerous other publications, including the New Yorker, Vogue and Punch. In 1957, he travelled to Moscow at the height of the Cold War to report on the celebrations marking the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, and later based the book Peer Behind the Curtain on his experiences. He reported from the Yemen war in 1962 and went to other war zones, including the Congo, Angola, Mozambique and Kurdistan.
Lord Kilbracken was in Perth, Australia, in 1950 when he learned that his father had died and he had inherited both the title and the family estate at Killegar on the Leitrim/Cavan border.
His son Christopher said he spent the next 55 years working to raise enough money to ensure that the Georgian stately home and 350-acre estate could remain his home.
Lord Kilbracken is survived by his son Christopher, who succeeds to the title, his daughter, Lisa, and son Seán, who was born in 1981 and lives at Killegar.