The Last Buccaneer

Poet, writer, veteran and cricket devotee, Alan Ross’s brilliant editorship of the London Magazine kept alive a literary tradition. The life of Alan Ross throws light on the whole period in which he lived. Born in Calcutta and shaped by his experience of the Royal Navy in the Second World War, Ross emerged as one of the most versatile literary figures of his generation – a poet of real distinction, a memoirist, a travel writer, and, for decades, the most admired cricket writer of his age. But it is as an editor that he left his deepest mark. For more than fifty years after the war, Ross played a role in Britain's cultural life that no one else did, or could: he linked the literary London of Cyril Connolly, John Lehmann, Horizon and New Writing with a younger generation of novelists, dramatists, travel writers and poets who appeared, or cut their teeth, in the pages of the magazine he owned and edited for forty years – William Boyd, Hilary Mantel, Graham Swift, Deborah Levy, Paul Theroux, Tony Harrison, Pankaj Mishra, and, going back to the early 1960s, Derek Walcott. If one thing characterised Ross's life, it was a gift for bringing together worlds that are usually kept well apart – literary and sporting, establishment and outsider, old guard and new.