In 1940 he went to read modern languages at St John's College, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. Ross represented the university at both cricket and squash but did not complete his studies after joining the Royal Navy in 1941. Before doing so, he appeared in the annual match against Cambridge at Lord's in 1941, but because of World War Two the fixture was reduced to a single day and did not have first-class status. The same season he appeared in one one-day match for Northamptonshire.

During his first two years in the Royal Navy, Ross served on several destroyers escorting supply ships to the Soviet Union. On 30 December 1942 Ross was almost killed whilst serving aboard , the leading destroyer in a convoy assigned to fend off a strong flotilla of German capital ships intent on annihilating the arctic convoy JW51B, at the Battle of the Barents Sea. He was trapped in the ship's hold, rapidly flooding, when he was rescued. This moment was immortalised in his poem "J.W.51B a convoy".

After he was demobilised in 1946 Ross decided not to resume his studies at Oxford but instead tried his hand at journalism. In 1946 his first poetry collection The Derelict Day was published, it contained poems he had written whilst in the Navy. The following year the publisher John Lehmann funded Ross and the artist John Minton to travel to Corsica to produce the travel book Time Was Away.

In 1949 Ross married Jennifer Fry, only daughter of Sir Geoffrey Fry, Bt. of the Frys who founded the chocolate company. He became a sports writer for The Observer in 1950 and became the paper's cricket correspondent in 1953, the same year his son was born. Throughout the 1950s Ross was a regular contributor to Lehmann's London Magazine, before taking over as the title's editor in 1961. He edited the monthly magazine until his death; during this period it transformed from an academic literary review to a far more cutting-edge review of the arts.

• The Derelict Day (1947)
• Time Was Away: a notebook in Corsica (1948)
• The bandit on the billiard table, a journey through Sardinia (1954)
• Something of the Sea (1954) pub. Derek Verschoyle - London
• Poems 1942-67 (1967)
• The Taj Express (1973)
• Open Sea (1975)
• Death Valley (1980)
• Blindfold Games (1986)
• Coastwise Lights (1988)
• Winter Sea: War, Journeys, Writers (1998)
• Reflections on Blue Water (2000)
• Poems (2005)

Major works on Cricket

• Australia 55 (1955)
• Cape Summer and the Australians in England (1956)
• Through the Caribbean (1960)
• Australia 63 (1963)
• Ranji: Prince of Cricketers (1983)
• The Cricketer's Companion (ed) (1960). Republished as Kingswood book of cricket (1979)
• Green fading into blue (1999) (Writings on sport)