Explore the vast range of titles available.

Mr. Pryce-Jones was well known in the United States as well as Britain. Though he remained a British subject, he moved to New York in 1960 and later to Newport. In addition to his tenure at The Times Literary Supplement, where he was editor from 1948 to 1959, he was a book critic for The New York Herald Tribune, The World Journal Tribune and Newsday and a theater critic for Theater Arts. He also wrote reviews and essays for The New York Times Book Review.

ALAN PRYCE-JONES was at the centre of the literary establishment for over half a century. He was variously editor of The Times Literary Supplement, novelist, book reviewer, theatre critic, co- author of a musical and man about many towns - London, Paris, Vienna, New York, Newport and latterly, Galveston, Texas. Brian Howard he dismissed as \"exotically handsome, after the manner of a Disraeli hero . . . he only needed the right spur to set him on the ladder of fame\"; Hamish St Clair Erskine was seen as a man of kingfisher charms, dazzling those whose life he touched but stumbling when more was required of him; and of Peter Watson Pryce- Jones wrote: Pryce-Jones came to terms with being born an aesthete in a military family. He was the elder of two sons of Col Henry Pryce- Jones CB DSO MVO MC, a Coldstream Guards officer and later a member of the Hon Corps of Gentlemen- at-Arms, who lived in Henry VIII Gateway at Windsor Castle. Alan's father hated wrist-watches, pocket combs and suede shoes. He was the youngest of eight children of Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones, High Sheriff of Montgomery and MP for the Montgomery Boroughs. Sir Pryce, who assumed the additional surname, was in turn a son of William Jones, a solicitor in Newtown, Montgomeryshire. Alan's eldest uncle was created a baronet in 1918, having again been High Sheriff and MP, and chairman of Pryce-Jones Ltd, the Newtown woollen manufacturers.

THE DEATH of Sir [Harold Acton] has captured the imagination as the passing of the age of the aesthete. Yet as always there are survivors and two fellow aesthetes stepped forward to pay tribute to him in obituaries, written in good time, at the pace at which aesthetes tackle such things. The novelist Anthony Powell and the writer Alan Pryce-Jones recalled a lost age and gave ample evidence of having studied Sir Harold closely, recounting anecdotes of his career while assessing his place in this century, with detail that might have caused Sir Harold some reflective discomfort. The modern author who professed himself an aesthete and wrote memoirs such as Sir Harold's would find himself subjected to the \"brilliant\" ideas of his publisher's PR. If maximum exposure were achieved, he would be set up on a panel in a television studio alongside the art critic Brian Sewell, and with two \"hearties\" having a go at him. His aestheticism would be mocked for the benefit of the half-watching viewer. He would look foolish. For this reason a man like Quentin Crisp cannot qualify to be described as an aesthete. The quality of charm has undermined many an aesthete. Anthony Blanche, the fictional part-recreation of the young Sir Harold at Oxford, in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, warns Charles Ryder that so much of English art is blighted by charm. Alan Pryce- Jones regretted the loss of Hamish St Clair Erskine in 1974, describing him as a \"bright apparition who once upon a time swept past them like a kingfisher: all colour and sparkle and courage\" but lamenting that he had found \"small place in a world which turned away from an unambitious charmer whose only enduring gift was his charm\"; and Cyril Connolly wrote: \"the world is full of charming failures, for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others\".

Evelyn Waugh, novelist, writes in his diary: \"I am reminded of the time Graham Greene and I went to Rheims with a mixed party of celebrities to visit the champagne houses. At the air office we were given a list of fellow-guests. Alan Pryce-Jones among them. Graham said: `I am not coming.

My first impression of Alan Pryce-Jones, editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1948 to 1959, who has died aged 91, was delightful, but none too serious. It was spring 1945 and Pryce- Jones, critic, writer, journalist - and then lieutenant colonel - arrived north of Venice at the British 8th Army headquarters. We gaped as he and Guards Colonel Jocelyn Gurney filled the officers' mess with London gossip. Then he flitted on to Vienna, where the British wing of the allied commission took over the Hapsburg palace of Schonbrunn. He knew that city well because his then wife Poppy (Therese Fould Springer) was of French/Austro- Hungarian Jewish descent and had had extensive property interests. The couple had lived in Vienna before the 1938 Nazi takeover, and, indeed, an administrator had remained to look after the Fould- Springer estates. Alan went to visit those lands in Slovakia, narrowly escaping arrest by the Russians. Postwar, Pryce-Jones was proposed by the TLS editor, Stanley Morison, as his successor. Morison, having turned the magazine into something tough and intellectual, handed it over to a serious, hardworking man, whom few outside international Vienna would have recognised. Pryce-Jones became seemingly rooted into the establishment; an Old Vic and National Portrait Gallery trustee, on the Royal College of Music council, a BBC Third Programme broadcaster and librettist of Lennox Berkeley's 1954 opera, Nelson.

A convivial figure on the literary scene, [Arthur Charles William Crook] was a dogged defender of editorial standards who would pounce on a howler, and ruthlessly excise any clichs or redundant verbiage. When he started work on the paper, Sir Bruce Richmond, the founding editor, was still at the helm; but whereas Richmond was a product of Winchester and New College, Crook had began life as a messenger boy on The Times. While Richmond rarely descended from the Olympian heights of his office, two floors up, Crook, known as \"Arthur'' by everyone, enjoyed the hurly-burly of production, and liked nothing better than regaling colleagues with the latest gossip gleaned over lunch at the Garrick. When DL Murray succeeded Richmond as editor, he made Crook an editorial assistant in 1941; and Murray's successor, the typographer Stanley Morison, also thought well of him. But although Morison, too, had started at the bottom, he became an authority on Renaissance printers and a prolific writer, whereas Crook was reluctant to put pen to paper. Not a line of his projected history of the paper, which he claimed to have loved \"as people loved a woman'', was ever written. Loyal to the TLS to the end, Crook left office in March 1974. In a profile of Crook published at the time of his retirement, Richard Boston wrote that he was \"exceptionally affable, sociable, convivial, and extrovert, altogether not the sort of person one might expect to find editing a paper as learned and sometimes drily academic as the TLS can be''.

Founded in 1902, the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) has had just nine editors. The first lasted only a few weeks, the second, Bruce Richmond, nearly four decades. The editorship of [Arthur Charles William Crook], who has died at the age of 93, was the second longest (1959-74), but for the eight preceding years, with the editor Alan Pryce-Jones abroad a good deal of the time, Arthur was effectively left as acting editor. TLS contributors under Richmond had included Henry James, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Max Beerbohm and EM Forster, but in the 1930s the paper rather lost its way and was then dumbed down under the wartime editorship of DL Murray. This decline was abruptly reversed with the appointment as editor of Stanley Morison, the great typographer. Morison was a complicated man, as extreme in his Roman Catholicism as in his Marxist leanings, which laid the paper open to accusations of fellow-travelling or even Stalin worship. Though Morison had had no formal further education, he was immensely erudite, and terrified everyone by sheer force of personality. However, he took the young Arthur under his wing and brought him on. In Morison's old age, Crook showed filial piety to his old mentor. The reviews continued to be unsigned. Anonymity was, for Arthur, the one thing that had to stay. There were powerful advocates on both sides of the argument. Campaigns against anonymity were mounted by such distinguished figures as FW Bateson and Frank Kermode. Arthur was simply inflexible. Inevitably his successor, John Gross, swiftly reversed the policy. Subsequent events have not always proved Arthur wrong. Where he was unquestionably right was in refusing to lower standards in any way, in spite of management pressures to make the paper more \"popular\".

John Calmann, an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, writes to his mother: \"On Tuesday I spent two hours at a vast party at Cliveden House (owned by the Astors) given by Douglas Fairbanks for his daughter. Jacob Rothschild took me about midnight - myself in the character of Adrian Berry who did not want to make use of his invitation.