A. Alvarez

A. Alvarez author of The Savage God, among other books, is currently working on a book about divorce.

Author’s Editor

A. Alvarez, 24 January 1980

When Tony Godwin died in 1976 the Times called him ‘the single most influential personality in British publishing since the war’ and added: ‘in his seven years with Penguin, Tony Godwin brought new life to what was fast becoming a moribund list and in doing so doubled their turnover.’ You would never guess this from J.E. Morpurgo’s biography of Allen Lane. He allows Godwin less than twenty pages out of almost four hundred and several of those twenty are devoted to a palace revolution Godwin is supposed to have plotted to depose the King Penguin. According to a letter to the Guardian from Godwin’s disenchanted but uniquely well-informed exwife, no such conspiracy ever existed.

What’s this? A. Alvarez

Ian Sansom, 24 August 2000

‘Every critic,’ H.L. Mencken wrote in his notebooks, is in the position, so to speak, of God ... He can smite without being smitten. He challenges other men’s work, and is...

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Literary Guy

Ian Jack, 19 June 1986

Readers of the old Eagle may remember that educative comic’s colourful centre-spread, where every week the latest triumphs of British technology (this was the new Elizabethan age) would be...

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God’s Godfather

Douglas Johnson, 6 October 1983

On the evening of 15 June 1982 Roberto Calvi landed in a private plane at Gatwick airport and using a false passport proceeded to London. At the time he was one of the most sought-after men in...

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First Chapters

Ursula Creagh, 3 June 1982

In the first chapter of this book, a chapter which concerns the time of our marriage, Alvarez has cast me in a variety of roles, from Jungle Jane to Giant Sloth. It may come as a surprise to him to find...

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