[3] He was born Reginald Ernest Warner in Birmingham, England, and brought up mainly in Gloucestershire, where his father was a clergyman.
[4] Warner's first three novels all reflect his anti-fascist beliefs; The Wild Goose Chase is in part a dystopian fantasy about the overthrow of a tyrannical government in a heroic revolution.
[8][9] His second novel, The Professor, published around the time of the Nazi Anschluss, is the story of a liberal academic whose compromises with a repressive government lead eventually to his arrest, imprisonment and murder "while attempting to escape".
[5] Warner then abandoned contemporary allegory in favour of historical novels about Ancient Greece and Rome, including Imperial Caesar, for which he was awarded the 1960 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
Imperial Caesar was praised by John Davenport as "delightfully perceptive and funny", and by Storm Jameson as "brilliant, intelligent, continuously interesting.
This formed the background to his book "Men of Stones: A Melodrama" (1949), depicting imprisoned leftists presenting King Lear in their prison camp.
He had further children including a daughter Anne, who wrote about the relationship between Warner and her mother (when he was not married) in the book 'The Blind Horse of Corfu'.
The cast included Peter Firth as Roy, the protagonist, Richard Briers as the Rector and Jill Bennett as Eustasia.