Neil Lyndon

Born in 1946, Lyndon grew up in the Sussex Weald,[4] a rural area and between 1958 and 1962 he attended Collyer's school, Horsham[5][6] In 1962 his father was bankrupted and sentenced to three years imprisonment for fraud and embezzlement, leaving the family short of money. Lyndon's mother then changed the family name to her maiden name and he moved to Gillingham School where he faced having to leave to get a job following completion of his O-levels due to the family's financial situation. Instead, his tutor Frank Hodgson paid the family money so Lyndon could complete his A-levels. Lyndon became head-boy and later set up the Frank Hodgson Trust for the school, providing similar financial support for sixth-form students. One of the ten houses at the school is also named after Lyndon.[7] As a teenager he was interested in progressive causes, he joined the Young Communist League[8] as well as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

According to a newspaper article written by Lyndon, he became, in 1965, the first student from a comprehensive school to be awarded an unconditional place at Cambridge University where he attended Queens' College.[9] At university he took a job in a scrap yard and later in light engineering.[10] He rapidly became involved with radical left-wing politics at Cambridge. He took part in many demonstrations and sit-ins and after his graduation he was a co-founder of The Shilling Paper, a radical weekly.[11] In 1969, he joined the editorial board of the underground paper The Black Dwarf.[12] Years later, in 2007 he wrote in The Sunday Times of his shame at how he had "once toasted mass murderers, torturers and totalitarian despots", particularly as he had distant relatives in Czechoslovakia.[13]

In the 1970s Lyndon worked in various divisions of the BBC, including for The Listener[14]

Lyndon was a journalist in the 1980s, writing for the "Atticus" column in The Sunday Times, as well as for The Times, The Independent, the Evening Standard and others. He wrote columns, profiles and feature articles covering a wide variety of issues such as politics, sport, music and books[15] Lyndon also make television appearances, including as a guest on a famous episode of Channel Four show After Dark.[16]

Lyndon first focused on gender issues in a 1990 essay for The Sunday Times Magazine entitled "Badmouthing". The 5,000-word piece argued that, in advertising, entertainment, the news media, family law, education and health research, "an atmosphere of intolerance surrounded men", blaming this intolerance on "the universal dominance of feminism".[12] Lyndon concluded the piece stating:

"If relations between men, women and children are to improve, attitudes to men and manhood must change. It wouldn’t be a bad start if men caused to be the butt of casual prejudice expressed in half-witted habits of speech. But the most important job our legislators face must be to remove some of the systemic disadvantages of life for men to improve their position within the family and within society at large. There is one sense in which men, as a group and a whole, can be described as a class in Britain: in a host of vital ways they second class citizens."

It later emerged that female writers at The Times had allegedly made an unsuccessful attempt to have Lyndon's article censored, so the women instead wrote a derogatory article about Lyndon in the Sunday Times Magazine's "Style" section.[17]

Lyndon married his first wife Monica Foot in 1971 and they divorced five years later. He married his second wife Deirdre in 1977[24] with whom he had a son and gained a step-son.[25] Following his separation from Deirdre she abducted his son and took him to Scotland and he was denied access to his child for two and a half years. Eventually, at age 15, Lyndon's son ran away from his alcoholic mother to live with his father[26]

He married his third wife Linda, a teacher. They have two daughters and live in Fife, Scotland.[27][28]

• No More Sex War: The failures of feminism, by Neil Lyndon, 1992, Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd ISBN 978-1-85619-191-3
• A Boyhood in the Weald, by Neil Lyndon, 1998, Pomegranate Press ISBN 978-0-9519876-8-1
• Sexual Impolitics: Heresies on sex, gender and feminism, 2014
• Men of Respect (formerly Hail to the Chief), a musical about America between the inaugurations of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, co-written by Lyndon.[29]

• Warren Farrell