Boris Ford

Richard Boris Ford (born in India on 1 July 1917, died 19 May 1998), known as Boris Ford, was a literary critic, writer, editor and educationist.

The son of an Indian Army officer, Brigadier Geoffrey Noel Ford, and his Russian wife Ekaterina, Ford was a chorister at King's College, Cambridge, eventually becoming head chorister. He was then educated at Gresham's School, and through his English master there, Denys Thompson, was introduced to F.R. Leavis under whom he studied at Downing College, Cambridge. Even before graduating, Ford's essay on Wuthering Heights was published by Leavis in Scrutiny in March 1939. Although he came to share many of Leavis's ideas, Ford could not follow Leavis in making "exclusion and exclusivity major features of [Leavis's] critical policy". Ford had an increasingly stormy relationship with Leavis and his wife Q. D.: at one point, Q. D. wrote to him "Mrs Leavis informs Mr Ford that he is no longer an acceptable visitor to her house. Any communications from him will not be answered."

After Cambridge, Ford joined the army, and from 1940 until the end of the Second World War was the officer commanding the Middle East School of Artistic Studies. He then became chief editor and director of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA). So critical of Britain were ABCA's seminars addressed to officers and men that Ford attracted the attention of MI5. Indeed, Ford believed that the Labour Party came to power in 1945 as a result of ABCA's democratizing influence.

In 1951 Ford became information officer of UNESCO's technical assistance board. In 1953 he was invited by W. E. Williams, who had been a colleague at ABCA, to edit a multi-authored seven-volume Pelican Guide to English Literature (1954–61; revised, 1982–8). This was indebted in many senses to Leavis, who, when he closed Scrutiny in 1953, remarked bitterly that Ford had "approached my main people", and considered that some of the Pelican Guide essays were derivative. Nonetheless, the series broke new ground: notably the first volume, The Age of Chaucer, included a 200-page anthology of non-Chaucerian medieval poetry in original texts, so introducing early English poetry to several contemporary poets.

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