About Alwyn W. Turner

Alwyn W Turner is a London-based writer of non-fiction whose work covers a diverse range of interests, from pulp fiction to politics, fashion to film, rock & roll to military bands. Running through it all is a fascination with the cultural and political history of Britain in the Twentieth Century.

His most recent work is The Last Post: Music, Remembrance and the Great War. It's also his best book.

Now available in paperback is A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s completing a trilogy of acclaimed books on modern Britain that started with Crisis? What Crisis? and Rejoice! Rejoice!

Other books include works on the first decades of British rock and roll – Halfway to Paradise and My Generation (both accompanied by exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum) – and Glam Rock, as well as The Biba Experience and The Man Who Invented the Daleks. He is also the co-author of Cult Rock Posters 1972-82 and Magic Gardens, and contributing editor of Portmeirion. Details of these, and other books, can be found on this site.

He lectures at the University of Chichester and anywhere else that they'll have him.

His work has been widely and enthusiastically reviewed, and has appeared in Books of the Year lists in the Sunday Times, the Observer, the New Statesman and the Spectator, and as Books of the Month in BBC History magazine and Publishing News.

TV appearances range from Richard & Judy and Flog It! to Panorama, and radio broadcasting from Radio 4's Start the Week, The Moral Maze, Today, Archive on 4 and The Last Word through to an agreeable half-hour with his favourite radio DJ Johnnie Walker on Radio 2, reminiscing about Biba. He has also contributed to documentary series such as Cilla's Unswung Sixties (UKTV), about the less fashionable end of the 1960s, Beyond a Joke (ITV), about sitcoms in the 1970s and 1980s, and Stand Down, Margaret (Radio 2) about political pop in the 1980s.

In previous lives he has been a gardener for the Army, a cinema projectionist, a failed election candidate, a secretary and a singer with an art-noise post-blues band (‘a cross between Anthony Perkins and Sandy from Crossroads,’ said the Melody Maker).

Feel free to email: Alwyn at AlwynWTurner dot com.