Rex Warner

Reginald "Rex" Ernest Warner (9 March 1905 – 24 June 1986) was an English classicist, writer, and translator who is best remembered for The Aerodrome. Warner was described by V. S. Pritchett as "the only outstanding novelist of ideas whom the decade of ideas produced".

Early life and education Warner was born in Birmingham, England, and brought up mainly in Gloucestershire, the son of the Frederic Ernest Warner, vicar of Amberley, and his wife Kathleen Luce, daughter of John James Luce. He was educated at St. George's School in Harpenden and at Wadham College, Oxford, where he associated with W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Stephen Spender, and published in Oxford Poetry. He obtained a 1st in Classical Moderations in 1925 and later graduated with a 3rd in English in 1928.

Career After his graduation, Warner spent time teaching, some of it in Egypt. Warner's debut story, "Holiday", appeared in the New Statesman in 1930. He was also a contributor to Left Review. Warner was a great admirer of Franz Kafka and his fiction was "profoundly influenced" by Kafka's work. His second novel, The Professor, published around the time of the Nazi Anschluss, is the story of a liberal academic whose compromises with a repressive government lead eventually to his arrest, imprisonment, and murder "while attempting to escape". Contemporary reviewers saw parallels with the Austrian leaders Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg. The Converts, a novel about Saint Augustine and dedicated it to the Greek poet and diplomat George Seferis, reflected Warner's own increasing devotion to Christianity.

Personal life Warner retired to England in 1973 and died in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, in 1986. He was married three times but to two women. His first marriage was to Frances Chamier Grove in 1929. Their marriage ended in divorce and in 1949 Warner married Barbara, Lady Rothschild, formerly the wife of Baron Victor Rothschild. Warner and his wife Frances had three children. He had further children including a daughter Anne, who wrote about the relationship between Warner and her mother (when he was not married) in the book The Blind Horse of Corfu. After his second divorce, he remarried his first wife in 1966.

Works Novels The Wild Goose Chase (1937) The Professor (1938) The Aerodrome (1941) Why Was I Killed? (1943; US title: Return of the Traveller, 1944) Men of Stones; A melodrama (1949) Escapade (1953) Young Caesar (1958) Imperial Caesar (1960) Pericles the Athenian (1963) The Converts (1967)

Fiction Men and Gods (1950)

Collections of poems Poems (1937) Poems and Contradictions (1945) New Poems 1954 (1954, with Laurie Lee and Christopher Hassall)

Non-fiction The Kite (1936) We're Not Going to Do Nothing: A Reply to Mr Aldous Huxley's Pamphlet "What Are You Going to Do About It?" (1936, with Cecil Day-Lewis) English Public Schools (1945) The Cult of Power (1946) John Milton (1949) E. M. Forster (1950, 2nd edition 1960, with John Morris) Greeks and Trojans (1951) Views of Attica (1951) Ashes to Ashes: A Post-Mortem on the 1940–51 Tests (1951, with Lyle Blair) Eternal Greece (1953) with Martin Hürlimann Athens (1956) with Martin Hürlimann The Greek Philosophers (1958) Look at Birds (1962) The Stories of the Greeks (1967) Athens at War (1970, a retelling of Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War) Men of Athens: The Story of Fifth-Century Athens (1972, vt. The Story of Fifth-Century Athens, with photographs by Dimitrios Harissiadis)

Translations from Ancient Greek Euripides, Medea (1944) Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (1947) Xenophon, Anabasis (1949, as The Persian Expedition, 1949) Xenophon, Hellenica (1950, as A History of My Time) Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (1954) Plutarch, Parallel Lives (1958, as Fall of the Roman Republic) Euripides, Helen (1958) Euripides, Hippolytus (1958) Plutarch, Moralia (as Moral Essays, 1971)

Translations from Latin War Commentaries of Caesar (1960, about the Gallic and Civil Wars) The Confessions of St. Augustine (1963)

Translation from Modern Greek On the Greek Style: Selected Essays in Poetry and Hellenism by George Seferis (1967, translated by Warner and T. D. Frangopoulos, with an introduction by Warner)

As editor The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1951) Look Up at the Skies: Poems and Prose Chosen by Rex Warner (1972, a selection of verse by Gerard Manley Hopkins, illustrated by Yvonne Skargon)

Film and TV adaptations

The Aerodrome (1983, written by Robin Chapman and directed by Giles Foster for the BBC, the cast included Peter Firth as Roy, the protagonist, Richard Briers as the Rector and Jill Bennett as Eustasia)