Alington, Adrian
Entry updated 18 November 2024. Tagged: Author.

(1895-1958) UK author, in active service during World War One. His Sanity Island (1941), set in the very Near Future in Meridia, an Island not unlike Britain, is a raucous comic Satire on political extremism and the farcical aspects of re-armament. Bypassed by World War Two, Meridia is riven by Fascists and Communists vying for control, until a clown named Bilbo is recruited to lead the Humorous Rearmament party and to laugh the extremists out of contention. A similar premise governs Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) and Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942). Alington's last novel, Excellency (1951), set on a fictitious Mediterranean island, repeats good-humouredly but not fantastically some of the effects of the earlier book; it was filmed as Excellency (1952). [JC]
Captain Adrian Richard Alington
born Oxford, Oxfordshire: 19 April 1895
died Surrey: 30 October 1958
works
- Sanity Island (London: Chatto and Windus, 1941) [hb/Clarke Hutton]
- Excellency (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951) [hb/]
links
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