Alan Hodge was born in 1915 and was educated at Oxford University. He and his wife Beryl then went to work with Robert Graves in Majorca, a collaboration that produced three books, Work in Hand (poems, with Norman Cameron), The Long Week-end and The Reader Over Your Shoulder. In 1939 the Hodges parted amicably so that Beryl could marry Graves. During the Second World War, Hodge worked for the Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, and after the war went with him to the Financial Times. He also worked as an editor for Hamish Hamilton. During the 1950s he worked for Winston Churchill on his History of the English Speaking Peoples. In 1951 he and Peter Quennell founded the magazine History Today, which he edited until his death in 1979. He and Peter Quennell were also joint authors of The Past We Share, a history of Anglo-American relations.