Poet, writer, veteran and cricket devotee, Alan Ross’s brilliant editorship of the London Magazine kept alive a literary tradition.

Alan Ross played a role in Britain’s cultural life that no one else did or could, linking not just the worlds of writing, painting and sport but the literary London of Cyril Connolly, John Lehmann, Horizon and New Writings with that of all those contemporary novelists, dramatists, travel writers and poets who appeared or cut their teeth in the pages of the London Magazine which he owned and edited for forty years. If you had to find the one thing that characterised Ross’s life it was that it brought together worlds usually kept well apart.

The richest biographies are those of lives which throw light on a whole period and that of Alan Ross is the perfect case in point.