Alexander Waugh was born in 1963 and is the grandson of the novelist, Evelyn Waugh and son of columnist, Auberon Waugh.

After reading music at Manchester University he worked as an impresario and concert agent. As a classical record producer he has been responsible for a host of prize-winning discs including five MRA Awards and a French Grand Prix du Disque. As a publisher, his innovative, fold-up Travelman Short Stories won a Design Council Millennium Award.  He was the Chief Opera Critic for the Mail on Sunday (1990-91) and later for the Evening Standard (1991-1996) while regularly surveying new classical music CDs for LBC Radio.  He has written many books on music including Classical Music, A New Way of Listening, which has been translated into fourteen foreign languages and has reviewed books on a large range of subjects for most of the major British broadsheets, contributed cartoons to the Literary Reviewand the Daily Telegraph and written for New York Review of Books and the Wall Street Journal.  His books Time (1999) and God (2002) were published to critical acclaim while his Fathers and Sons (2004) a portrait of the male relations in his own family, was been made into 90-minute documentary film by BBC 4 (2005). In 2006 he presented a second documentary called The Piano – a Love Affair also for BBC 4.  His musical comedy Bon Voyage! (co-written with his brother Nathaniel), which won the 12th Vivian Ellis Award for Best New Musical, was staged at the Tabernacle in London bwher it received three standing ovations. In 2008 he published his best known book The House of Wittgenstein – about the one armed pianist Paul Wittegnstein and his philosopher brother, Ludwig, which is currently being developed as a feature film.

He is a Senior Visiting Fellow of the University of Leicester and General Editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, a 43-volume scholarly edition for the Oxford University Press.  He served as Honorary President of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition and from 2016 as Chairman of the De Vere Society.  In an earlier life he chaired of the Remunerations Committee of a FTSE 250 company, Millennium and Copthorne Hotels PLC, upon whose board he sat as an independent director for nearly 9 years.  He has recently completed a three-volume 1500-page scholarly work of reference entitled The New Shakespeare Allusion Book (co-edited with Dr Roger Stritmatter). His radio play Shakespeare in Court is available from Amazon as a Kindle Single or from the De Vere Society website as a 2 CD audio set.  His YouTube channel of illustrated lectures on Shakespeare as the pseudonym for Edward de Vere has received over one million views and his work on the Shakespearean authorship question is the subject of a chapter in Elizabeth Winker’s popular new book Shakespeare is a Woman and other Heresies (Simon and Schuster, 2023).  With Maudie Lowe he has recently started a new podcast program, 174T, for discussion of all matters relating to Shakespeare.

For recreation he plays the violin and piano and tries to go for long walks.  He has three grown-up children and now lives in rural Somerset with his wife, Eliza.