Place Name
Alan Coren (June 27, 1938 – October 18, 2007) was a journalist, broadcaster and the self-styled Sage of Cricklewood (where he lived). Between 1971 and 1984 he variously wrote for The Times, Daily Mail, Observer and Tatler. In 1984 he was television critic for The Mail on Sunday until he moved as a humorous columnist to the Sunday Express, which he left in 1996. He was a regular on the BBC radio show The News Quiz and a team captain on BBC1’s Call My Bluff. For almost a decade he was the editor of Punch magazine. In 1989 he started a column in The Times, which he continued for the rest of his life. Among his many humorous books were A Year in Cricklewood (1991), Toujours Cricklewood? (1993), The Cricklewood Dome (1998), and The Cricklewood Tapestry (2002). Writing about the Rhodes must fall campaign, his son, Gile Coren joked: “If merely being the long-dead ancestor of a controversial icon of white privilege is enough to disqualify you from the London A-Z, then my heart goes out to an inconsequential little turning in suburban Cricklewood currently down in the maps as ‘Alan Coren Close’.”
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