Tony Gould obituary

My brother Tony Gould, who has died aged 87, was a journalist and author; he worked as literary editor at the New Society and New Statesman magazines in the 1970s and 80s. Helped by his charm and sociability, Tony assembled a stellar cast of reviewers and writers at those titles, including John Berger, Angela Carter, Eric Hobsbawm, Colin MacInnes, George Melly and Colin Ward. He wrote nine books himself, beginning in 1972 with Stories from the Dole Queue, co-authored with the trade union organiser Joe Kenyon, and including a history of the Gurkhas, Imperial Warriors: Britain and the Gurkhas (1999) and a social history of polio, A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors (1995). Both of those books reflected his own experiences, first as a national serviceman and second as someone who had contracted polio. Born in Bovey Tracey, Devon, to Jack and Beryl (nee Hancock), who ran the family farm near the village of East Allington, Tony left King’s Bruton school in Somerset at 16. He then did national service from the age of 17 with the Gurkhas, serving in Malaya, Nepal and Hong Kong, where he contracted polio, spending several weeks in an iron lung before being told that he would never wal