Photo: Sunday Times Insight team - 'Australian Mafia'. Bruce Page, Phillip Knightley, Alex Mitchell & Nelson Mews (Source: Come the Revolution by Alex Mitchell)

Australian journalist Phillip Knightley, one of the greatest investigative reporters of his generation, has died in England, aged 87.

Knightley played a crucial role in the paper’s thalidomide exposé and Kim Philby Soviet spy revelations, and broke the story of the tax avoidance of the Vestey family’s cattle-based business empire.

Knightley, whose first reporting job was at The Northern Star in Lismore, NSW, worked under the editorships of Denis Hamilton and Harold Evans at the Times and was a two-time British Journalist of the Year.

Read The Guardian's obituary

Watch a 2009 interview with Phillip Knightley by SBS Dateline's David Brill