Alfred Reynolds (writer)

Alfred Reynolds (Reinhold Alfréd) (b. 13 December 1907, Budapest, d. 1993, London) was a writer on social and religious topics. He is known in Hungary principally as a poet and for his publication of poems by Miklós Radnóti and others in the 1930s, and in England for his leadership of the Bridge Circle, post-1945.

Reynolds was born into a wealthy family in Budapest, of a Jewish mother and a Roman Catholic father. He was educated at schools in Budapest and Vienna and at the University of Leipzig (1928–1931). In 1931 he founded the literary magazine Haladás (Progress), in which he published the poets Miklós Radnóti, István Vas and Mihály-András Rónai. The police forced him to close the magazine, but then he started a left-leaning monthly, Névtelen Jegyző (Anonymous Chronicler), which published his only collection of poetry, Első és utolsó lírai kötete (First and Last Book of Lyrics) (1932) before it too was closed down. Reynolds briefly joined the Communist Party of Hungary, leaving after Joseph Stalin's assassination of Sergey Kirov in 1934. He was imprisoned, subsequently placed under police observation and lost his job. In 1936 he escaped from Hungary and went to London where he lived for the rest of his life. He was in the British Army during the Second World War and joined the Intelligence Corps in 1944, participating in the denazification programme, see below.

In post-war London Reynolds led a libertarian group called the Bridge Circle. Articles from its journal, the London Letter, are collected in Pilate's Question (1982), the title essay of which was the group's central focus of attention. Writers who early in their careers attended Bridge Circle meetings included Sidney E. Parker, Nicolas Walter, Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd. Most notable was Colin Wilson, who has said he first wrote The Outsider as a riposte to Pilate's Question.

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