A thoughtful and sensitive man, Nick Clarke brought to the lunchtime BBC radio news programme, The World at One, which he fronted for 12 years from 1994, a quality of impartiality that is not always associated with television and radio presenters. He notably eschewed the confrontational style of such distinguished predecessors as the late Robin Day, whose “Chuck it Roy!” (to Roy Hattersley) set a benchmark for interviewer intolerance in the 1980s.

It was Clarke’s belief that listening to what interviewees had to say before assailing their logic was more likely to benefit the listener — for whom, after all, the exercise was being conducted. He hated hectoring, and even interrupting. “I believe it’s always possible to find a pause, however microscopic, into which a question can be inserted,” was his watchword.

These qualities made him a particularly good, because unobtrusive, presenter of Round Britain Quiz and Any Questions, on those occasions when he stood in for their regular presenters.

Clarke had come to radio from newspapers and television, where he had been a reporter for the BBC’s Money Programme, and a correspondent and presenter for Newsnight. The move from television was not merely a rueful acceptance of necessity. Radio proved to be his metier.

For one thing, it was a good medium for a rich speaking voice nurtured by acting at school and at Cambridge. And he found that the greater length of time that could be devoted to each topic was far more conducive to teasing out a coherent examination of whatever issue might be under discussion. At the time, he was aware of the danger of allowing any interview to “drown in a brown broth of words, delivered by experts”. As he daily considered the content of the forthcoming broadcast he liked to rehearse the programme’s credo: “What is the object here?”

Nicholas Campbell Clarke was born at Godalming in Surrey, in 1948. Though acting attracted him, journalism was always likely to beckon most strongly. His father, John Clarke, who was to die of cancer when Nick was 18, was cricket correspondent for the Evening Standard. His mother Ruth died 16 years ago, also of cancer.

Clarke went to the Barn School, Much Hadham, Essex, where he was learning French and Latin from the age of 6. From there he went away to prep school at Westbourne House, near Chichester, where his acting career began as the dragon’s head in The Dragon Who Liked Peppermints.

From Westbourne House he won a scholarship to Bradfield College, Berkshire, then under the rule of the redoubtable Anthony Chenevix-Trench, later to go to Eton. At Bradfield, with its stone amphitheatre, drama soon had Clarke in thrall. He played the lead in Euripides’ Hippolytus — “400-and-something lines in Greek which I did not understand a word of” — and Macduff in a notable Macbeth in which he and the protagonist elected to extend the final fight to ten minutes in pouring rain, while the long-suffering audience longed for their misery to be put to an end.

At Fitzwilliam College, Camridge, he read French and German, threw himself into drama, and resuscitated the almost moribund magazine Broadsheet.

Like his father he began in journalism on the Yorkshire Evening Post. In 1973 he joined BBC NorthWest in Manchester where for the next six years he was a reporter and then industrial correspondent.

In 1980 he joined the BBC’s Money Programme, from where he joined the Newsnight team in 1986. His introduction to radio came with The World This Weekend, which he presented from 1989.

The crowning appointment of his career came with his translation to The World at One. The mantle of its dynamic founder-presenter William Hardcastle had been borne by some equally charismatic figures over the years, but Clarke was content to conduct the programme’s affairs in his own style, making himself no less formidable an inquisitor in the process.

In 1999 he was voted the Voice of the Listener and Viewer’s Radio Broadcaster of the Year, and in 2000 he was voted Broadcaster of the Year by the Broadcasting Press Guild.

Clarke was the author of two books. Alistair Cooke: The Biography (1999) was regarded as a magisterial account of the career of the veteran broadcaster known for decades throughout the English-speaking world as the author of the weekly radio Letter from America. The Shadow of a Nation, published in 2003, was a survey of the postwar British political scene, focusing on the major political figures of the period.

In November last year Clarke discovered a lump on his left buttock which was diagnosed as being cancerous. To prevent the sarcoma spreading, his left leg was amputated, and he was able to return to work part time on The World at One in August. With his wife, Barbara, he had recorded the experience of coping with cancer in an audio diary, Fighting to be Normal, broadcast in June.

In his spare time Clarke was a fanatically keen cricketer. He was also a good cook and a devotee of fine wine.

He was twice married, first, in 1973, to Sue Armstrong. There were two sons and one daughter (one son and the daughter being twins) of the marriage, which was dissolved in 1990. In 1991 he married the BBC television producer and writer Barbara Want. His wife and children survive him.

Nick Clarke, journalist, was born on June 9, 1948. He died of cancer on November 23, 2006, aged 58