Peter Wallis
Peter Wallis was co-founder of management consultancy SRU with Dennis Stevenson[1]. Wallis was appointed Chairman of the Department of Trade and Industry Committee in 1994. The committee was set up to examine the future of leisure in the UK as part of the British Government's 'Foresight' initiative. Peter Mandelson worked as a consultant to SRU between 1990 and 1992.
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Peter York
Wallis is also well-known as Peter York, the writer, author and broadcaster on social styles and trends. He is a columnist for The Independent on Sunday, Management Today and GQ.
Peter York
It is under his pseudonym Peter York that Wallis has made his most high-profile offerings, from writing the Sloane Ranger Handbook and being Style Editor of Harpers & Queen for 10 years, to financing The Modern Review.
Emulating his hero, the American journalist Tom Wolfe, Peter published a series of essays in social and cultural observation in the magazine Harpers & Queen during the late 1970s. Written in the style of Wolfe's new journalism, these were collected in the book Style Wars (1980). Following the enormous success of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982), itself an extension of such social observation, Peter became a sought-after media commentator on English social trends and traits. A further collection of essays, Modern Times, was published in 1984. Peter York's Eighties (1995), co-authored with Charles Jennings, was both a book and a BBC television series.
Dictators' Homes (2005), published in the US under the title Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World's Most Colorful Despots, explored the interior design favoured by dictators as a reflection of their despotic characters.
York wrote that "Rock and roll is the hamburger that ate the world." (The quote is from his essay 'Grey Hopes' (Harpers and Queen, 1978), collected in Style Wars (London, Sidwick and Jackson, 1980: p. 194)
Publications
- Style Wars (1980)
- The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982)
- Peter York's Eighties (1995), co-authored with Charles Jennings
- Dictators' Homes (2005)
- Cooler, Faster, More Expensive: the Return of the Sloane Ranger (2007), with Olivia Stewart-Liberty.
