My brother Tony Gould, who has died aged 87, was a journalist and author; he worked as literary editor at the New Society and New Statesman magazines in the 1970s and 80s.
Helped by his charm and sociability, Tony assembled a stellar cast of reviewers and writers at those titles, including John Berger, Angela Carter, Eric Hobsbawm, Colin MacInnes, George Melly and Colin Ward.
He wrote nine books himself, beginning in 1972 with Stories from the Dole Queue, co-authored with the trade union organiser Joe Kenyon, and including a history of the Gurkhas, Imperial Warriors: Britain and the Gurkhas (1999) and a social history of polio, A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors (1995). Both of those books reflected his own experiences, first as a national serviceman and second as someone who had contracted polio.
Born in Bovey Tracey, Devon, to Jack and Beryl (nee Hancock), who ran the family farm near the village of East Allington, Tony left King’s Bruton school in Somerset at 16. He then did national service from the age of 17 with the Gurkhas, serving in Malaya, Nepal and Hong Kong, where he contracted polio, spending several weeks in an iron lung before being told that he would never walk again. But walk he did – with callipers, sticks and great determination.
After gaining a degree in English at Cambridge University he travelled in Spain for a while, returning initially to Devon, where he taught English at Dartington College, before moving to London and finding work as a general talks producer at BBC radio (1967-69).
From 1970 to 1973 he was a lecturer in liberal studies at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University), but after realising that teaching was not for him, he went back to the BBC as a freelance producer, working mainly for BBC Radio 4’s arts magazine programme Kaleidoscope.
His experience in that sphere led him in 1975 to be appointed books editor at New Society, where he remained until becoming literary editor of the New Statesman when the magazines amalgamated in 1988. He left in 1990 to concentrate on freelance writing for a range of publications, as well as working on his books.
At home Tony loved entertaining friends over a glass of red wine. He was wise and affectionate with a mischievous sense of humour. A lifelong Chelsea fan, he followed sport avidly. Back in Devon in later life, he discovered Tramper, an off-road mobility scooter, which gave him back the freedom to roam and re-animated his dormant love of the county, in particular Dartmoor.
Tony married Lesley Peters in 1965. They had two children, Conrad and Frankie (who died in 2019), before divorcing in 1973. He met his second wife, New Zealander Jenny Cowell, at the home of their mutual friend the poet Fleur Adcock, and they were married in 1974.
Jenny died in 2022. He is survived by Conrad, by Tom, a son from his second marriage, six grandchildren and me.
