Brown, Ivor John Carnegie (1891–1974)

British journalist and writer. Among his works are The Meaning of Democracy (1920), Masques and Phases (1927), and Brown Studies (1930). From 1942 to 1948 he edited the Observer.

Brown was born in Penang, China. He was educated at Oxford and entered the civil service in 1913 but abandoned it for journalism, and was drama critic successively of the Manchester Guardian, the Saturday Review, the Sketch, and Punch. He was professor of drama of the Royal Society of Literature in 1939, and chair of the British Drama League from 1954.

He wrote books on H G Wells (1922) and Shakespeare (1949), Balmoral (1955), and a number of small popular works on the meaning and etymology of out-of-the-way words: A Word in Your Ear (1942), Mind Your Language (1962), and others.