Sir Peter Courtney Quennell CBE (9 March 1905 – 27 October 1993) was an English biographer, literary historian, editor, essayist, poet, and critic.[1] He wrote extensively on social history. In his Times obituary he was described as "the last genuine example of the English man of letters".[2] Anthony Powell called him "The Last of the Mandarins".[3]
Born in Bickley, Kent, he was the son of architect C. H. B. Quennell and his wife Marjorie Quennell. After World War I the Quennells wrote a popular series of illustrated children’s books, A History of Everyday Things in England (four volumes, 1918–1934). Peter Quennell was educated at Berkhamsted School (where the headmaster was Graham Greene's father) and at Balliol College, Oxford, though he left Oxford before taking a degree.[2] While still at school some of his poems were selected by Richard Hughes for the anthology Public School Verse, which brought him to the attention of writers such as Edith Sitwell.[4] At Oxford he forged some lasting literary friendships, including with Robert Graves, and some enemies (Evelyn Waugh).[3]
In 1922 he published his first book, Masques and Poems, and gained further attention when some of his poems were published in the influential Edward Marsh anthology Georgian Poetry 1920–1922. But Quennell soon abandoned poetry for prose, and especially biography and non-fiction. His first major book, commissioned by T. S. Eliot, was Baudelaire and the Symbolists (1929).[2] Other literary biographies followed, including the Four Portraits of 1945 (studies of Boswell, Gibbon, Sterne, and Wilkes), and full length works on Byron (three volumes, 1934, 1935, 1941), Pope (1949), Ruskin (1949), Hogarth (1955), Shakespeare (1963), Proust (1971) and Samuel Johnson (1972).[5]
He first practised journalism in London and wrote several books and essays on London (for instance, Casanova in London, 1971). In 1930 he taught at the University of Tokyo, a somewhat negative experience he turned into a positive through the success of his written account, A Superficial Journey through Tokyo and Peking (1932). During the war he took posts within the Ministry of Information and the Auxiliary Fire Service.[2] In 1944–51, he was editor of The Cornhill Magazine and from 1951 to 1979 founder-editor of History Today, working in partnership with the historian Alan Hodge.[6]
Quennell published three volumes of autobiography, The Sign of the Fish (1960, his own growth as a writer), The Marble Foot (1976, covering the years 1905 to 1938) and The Wanton Chase: an Autobiography from 1939 (1980). Customs and Characters (1982) collected together anecdotes of his friends and contemporaries.[3] He continued to work hard even into his old age, tackling more general subjects in his later work. His final book, In Pursuit of Happiness (1988), published when he was 83 years old, was a response to a remark from his father, remembered from childhood: "Well, we're not happy are we?"[2] In all he published over thirty books and edited thirty-seven more.[4]
He married five times: to Nancy Marianne (1928), Marcelle Marie José (1935), Joyce Frances Glur (1938), Sonia Geraldine Leon (1956, daughter Sarah), and Joan Marilyn Peek (1967, son Alexander). He also had a relationship with the writer Barbara Skelton in the 1940s, sharing a flat with her.[4]
He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), and was knighted in the 1992 New Year Honours. Quennell died in University College Hospital, Camden, London. His funeral was held at St Mark's Church, Regent's Park.[4]
Quennell's first cousin – daughter of his father's brother Walter – was Joan Quennell, a Conservative MP.[7][8]
