Alington, Adrian
Entry updated 13 April 2026. Tagged: Author.
(1895-1958) UK author, in active service during World War One, active as an author from before 1930. The Vanishing Celebrities; Or, the Room in the West Tower (1938), a fantasy with ghosts and a cast of spoofish figures of renown, sets the tone for his Scientific Romance Sanity Island (1941), a raucous comic Satire on political extremism and the farcical aspects of re-armament which takes place in the very Near Future, in Meridia, a Ruritanian Island that mockingly resembles a miniature Britain. 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 the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933), Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) and to a degree 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 Redhill, Surrey: 30 October 1958
works (selected)
- The Vanishing Celebrities; Or, the Room in the West Tower (London: Chatto and Windus, 1938) [hb/]
- Sanity Island (London: Chatto and Windus, 1941) [hb/Clarke Hutton]
- Excellency (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951) [hb/]
links
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