Graham Lord, F’60

Graham Lord is a British author whose most recent book, Lord of the Files, is a collection of short stories, essays, travel articles and journalism to follow his previous book, Lord’s Ladies and Gentlemen: 100 Legends of the 20th Century, which describes more than a hundred writers, actors, politicians, sportsmen and other celebrated people whom he met during forty years as a journalist in London’s Fleet Street.

His books have been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Russian and Chinese.

Born in 1943 in Southern Rhodesia, Graham went to Falcon from 1957 to 1960 but spent his holidays in Mozambique, where his family lived. After Falcon, Graham took an honours degree in History at Cambridge, edited the university newspaper Varsity and joined the Sunday Express in London in 1965, where he spent 27 years, 23 of them as Literary Editor, writing a weekly column about books and interviewing almost every major English language author of the 1960s to 1990s, from P. G. Wodehouse and Graham Greene to Muriel Spark and Ruth Rendell.

In 1987 he launched the £20,000 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and after leaving the Sunday Express in 1992 wrote regular literary, travel and opinion pieces for The Daily Telegraph, The Times and the Daily Mail. From 1994 to 1996 he edited the short story magazine Raconteur.

His latest novel, Under a Hammock Moon, is a comic love/adventure story set on a small Caribbean island similar to the one where he lived with his artist wife, Juliet. They also had a house in the South of France and an apartment in London. He had two daughters and two grandchildren in their 20s. Juliet has a son, a daughter and five grandchildren.

In 2014 Graham was diagnosed with liver cancer and finaly gave up his struggles at 9.20pm on Saturday June 13 2015 at The Trinity Hospice, Clapham. Juliet was with him till the end. He was cremated at Putney Vale Crematorium on Thursday July 9 at 2pm.

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Photography credits (top picture) – 1970 Sunday Express – 1974 Leonard Trievnor – 1992 Tony Weaver – 1996 Daily Mail – 2009 Bill Hart; the 1959 picture, of course, shows Graham as FOBs of his era may remember him!

Text credit: a large slice of the text for this page was taken, with permission, from the front page of Graham’s website, designed and maintained by his brother, Rod