Peter Wilby The Guardian, Monday June 2 2008 Article history

Remembering Alan Brien

Last week's obituaries of Alan Brien, I thought, didn't quite pinpoint his place in the history of journalism. Brien, as one obituarist said, was a critic and essayist in the tradition of Belloc and Chesterton. He reviewed film, theatre and books when reviewers were among the biggest newspaper stars. Now, the stars are general columnists, writing about life, the universe and everything, but mainly about themselves and their families.

Brien, who died at 83, straddled those two eras, being not only among the last of the old, but also among the first of the new. Harold Evans, when Sunday Times editor, said Brien could get more interesting copy from the fluff in his navel than some hacks could get from a month on the road. Once, when he was driving up the motorway with his wife, the Guardian's Jill Tweedie, a tiny pebble shattered the car windscreen. Between them, I swear, they got six columns out of it. The record probably stands to this day.

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Der Teufel

When Alan's boyhood friend, David Maccaby, who became a painter and later blind, took Alan home for the first time, his mother, on opening the front door, reeled back with 'Der Teufel', Satan. The Hebrew term for Satan has a decidely different meaning than in Christianity. It is the title of a Prosecutor at the Divine Court.

Satan, the Devil, Pan....

A link to John Milton's 'Paradise Lost', the book Alan carried with him when flying as a rear air gunner in the Lancaster.

A Film Impression of Jesus College, Oxford in 1948: 'Our College'

Administration by Alan Brien, Peter Broadhurst also Geoffrey Hunter, Peter Davis, Derick Grigs.

Reissued 2006. Jesus College, Oxford.