A. G. Macdonell

Macdonell was born in Poona, India to a Scottish family, the younger son of William Robert Macdonell, LL.D, an East India merchant and chairman of the Bombay chamber of commerce, and Alice Elizabeth, daughter of miller and art collector John Forbes White, who had trained as a doctor.

His father was "a prominent personality" in Bombay, and "a devoted student of literature and the arts" who corresponded with the novelist George Gissing; his mother's sister, Rachel White, was a distinguished Newnham College, Cambridge-educated classical scholar and one of the earliest female teachers of the subject.

[1][2][3] Macdonell was educated at Winchester where he excelled academically and at sports, representing the school at association football and golf.

The book gained considerable critical and popular acclaim, and won the James Tait Black Award that year.

Macdonell was also a connoisseur of military history, and wrote a historical study called Napoleon and his Marshals (1934).

A review of an amateur production in Thursley, printed in The Times in January 1930, notes that he played his role with "immense gusto" which was "vastly to the taste of the audience".

His second wife was Rose Paul-Schiff, whose family was associated with the banking firm of Warburg and who had fled to England from her native Vienna just before the Anschluss.