Alastair Ivor Gilbert Boyd, 7th Baron Kilmarnock (11 May 1927 – 19 March 2009) was a
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
writer,
HispanophileHispanophile is a word with two meanings. The first meaning refers to a person who is fond of Spain, its people, or its cultures, and it can also be the corresponding adjective...
, and Chief of the
Clan BoydClan Boyd is a Scottish clan from Kilmarnock in Ayrshire, Scotland. Clan Boyd is a Lowland clan.-Origins of the clan:There are two main theories on the origin of the name. The first asserts that name is descriptive, deriving from the Gaelic 'buidhe', meaning 'fair' or 'blonde'...
.
He was educated at
Bradfield CollegeBradfield College is a coeducational public school located in the small village of Bradfield in the English county of Berkshire.The college was founded in the 1850s by Thomas Stevens, Rector and Lord of the Manor of Bradfield...
and
King's College, CambridgeKing's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.Founded in 1441, the college's formal name is "The King's College of Our Lady and St. Nicholas in Cambridge". It is usually referred to simply as "King's" within the university.- History :King's was founded in 1441 by...
and was commissioned into the
Irish GuardsThe Irish Guards , part of the Guards Division, is a Foot Guards regiment of the British Army.Along with the Royal Irish Regiment, it is one of only two purely Irish regiments remaining in the British Army...
in 1946. He served with them until 1948, including a spell in
PalestinePalestine is a conventional name used, among others, to describe a geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands.As a geographical term, Palestine can also refer to 'ancient Palestine,' an area...
.
He married Diana Mary Gibson in 1954 but the marriage was dissolved in 1970. Gibson died in 1975. He married for the second time, in 1977 to Hilary Bardwell ("Hilly"), whose previous husbands had been
Kingsley AmisSir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than twenty novels, three collections of poetry, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism...
and
D. R. Shackleton BaileyDavid Roy Shackleton Bailey, FBA, was a British scholar of Latin literature who spent his academic life teaching at the University of Cambridge, the University of Michigan, and Harvard...
; and the couple had one son, James Charles Edward Boyd who was born in 1972. After the end of Kingsley Amis's later marriage he came to live with Lord Kilmarnock and his ex wife Hilly.
His younger brother, Robin Jordan Boyd, known as "Tiger" (born 1941), succeeded to the peerage.
His publications include
Sabbatical Year (1958);
The Road from Ronda (1969);
The Companion Guide to Madrid and Central Spain (1974);
The Essence of Catalonia (1988);
The Sierras of the South (1992);
The Social Market and the State (1999); and
Rosemary: A Memoir (2005).
He lived for much of his life at
RondaRonda is a city in the Spanish province of Malaga. It is located about from the city of Málaga, within the autonomous community of Andalusia. Its population is 35,512.-History:...
in
AndalusiaAndalusia Andalusia Andalusia .
His essay, The Quest (2006), on the paintings of his friend
Miles Richmond Miles Peter Richmond was a British artist.Born Peter Richmond, in Isleworth, Middlesex, he added the name Miles in the 1980s, and became generally known as such. From 1940 to 1943 he attended Kingston School of Art, and then, as a conscientious objector worked on the land...
(1922-2008), appeared in catalogues that accompanied exhibitions by Richmond at the Convento de Santo Domingo, Ronda (2006) and the Galeria Italcable,
MalagaMálaga is a city in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, Spain. It is the second most populous city of Andalusia, the sixth largest in Spain and 43rd-most populous municipality in the European Union, with a population of 566,447 in 2008...
(2008). Richmond had arrived at Ronda in 1954 to work beside his teacher,
David BombergDavid Garshen Bomberg was an English painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.The most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists that studied under Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Art, Bomberg painted a series of complex geometric compositions combining the influences of cubism and...
, in Bomberg's last years. He and Boyd first met at Ronda in 1957, when Richmond and his wife Susanna - both painters - introduced Boyd and Diana to the 'pleasure and practicability of getting around the countryside on horseback'.
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