He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and held posts in academia for a period, in the US and London, including time working with poet Robert Lowell and at Harvard University.

He held ministerial posts under Margaret Thatcher, in the areas of employment and Northern Ireland, and was Minister of State for the Arts, as well as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with responsibility for Civil Service reform.

Alexander Patrick Greysteil Hore-Ruthven was born on 26 November 1939,[2] in Dublin, Ireland,[3] the elder son of Major the Hon.

[2][1][4] His surname drew on the Ruthven clan of Scotland, a name once outlawed, and the Hore family of County Wexford, Ireland.

[6] His parents were both active in Cairo during the Second World War, his father, "Pat" to the family,[6] as a major in the Rifle Brigade, and his mother working with the intelligence services.

[5] His father was killed in action at Tripoli in 1942, while attached to the then-new SAS,[1] at which point Gowrie became his paternal grandfather's heir apparent; his grandparents played an active role in his upbringing thereafter.

[4] On his mother's return to Ireland in early 1942 while pregnant with his brother, they lived for a period in what she described as a dreary house in Greystones, County Wicklow.

[1] His family moved for a time to a tower at Windsor Castle,[5] where the 1st Earl was deputy constable,[2] and then returned to Ireland, living in Dublin and Kilcullen, County Kildare.

His mother remarried in 1952, to her partner Major Derek Cooper,[5][7] and the family moved to a Regency lodge on a 4,000-acre country estate[8] at Dunlewey, a village at the edge of the Poisoned Glen in Gweedore, County Donegal.

[7] After Eton, Gowrie attended Balliol College, Oxford, and while there he succeeded Paul Foot as editor of The Isis Magazine.

[1] Early deals included a portrait of Peter Lacy by Francis Bacon, which Gowrie offered first, at no commission, to the National Gallery of Ireland.

[11] He dealt in Old Masters, Picassos, and David Hockney at an early stage, and on one occasion sold a Jackson Pollock to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., for $2 million.

[6] He was involved in the legalisation of homosexual acts in Northern Ireland in 1982, remarking to Ian Paisley, who led delegations opposed to the move, "We're not proposing to make it compulsory".

He also played a part in discussions about restoring devolved government and proposed a model using a formal arrangement between the two main communities of Northern Ireland, somewhat like that which was eventually introduced under the Good Friday Agreement.

[17] He said that rumours that Thatcher favoured cuts to arts funding were false: "We had this deal that I was to complain royally and whinge about money, but she’d smuggle me some.

[15] After leaving government, Gowrie in 1985 took up a post as chairperson of Sotheby's International, overseeing the auction house's business in Europe and the Far East, at a reputed salary of around £150,000.

[19][4] During his time at Sotheby's he was appointed as chairperson of the trustees of the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, newly taken under State management, with Diana, Princess of Wales as patron.

He chaired the Booker Prize panel which dismissed A Suitable Boy, of which he commented "we wanted the book to succeed ...we thought it was abysmally edited and tailored.

[23] Gowrie opened the first Bacon exhibition in the Soviet Union, in 1988 at the Central House of Artists in Moscow, for which he also wrote the catalogue introduction.

[33] In 2008, he accepted an invitation from CEO Farad Azima to chair the newly-formed Advisory Board of the Iran Heritage Foundation.

[41] Gowrie inherited Castlemartin House and Estate at Kilcullen in County Kildare, Ireland, from his great-aunt, Sheelagh Blacker, in 1967, and later sold it to Tony O'Reilly.

[2] He lived partly in Ireland until 1983, and then, selling his Kildare house to Ronnie Wood,[6] moved to the Welsh Marches village of Llanfechain[42] in what was formerly Montgomeryshire.

[42] He maintained a London home for much of his adult life, during his time in ministerial office in Covent Garden,[6] latterly a house in Kensington.