Colwyn Edward Vulliamy (20 June 1886 – 4 September 1971) was an Anglo-Welsh biographer and author. He was mostly credited as C. E. Vulliamy, but he sometimes used the pen name Anthony Rolls for his crime fiction.
Born in Glasbury, Radnorshire, into a landed branch of the Vulliamy family, Vulliamy was the son of Edwyn Papendiek Vulliamy and Edith Jane Beaven.[1]
His James Boswell (1933) has been called “the cruellest and most damaging portrait of his subject that has ever been composed”.[2] Vulliamy's Ursa Major: A Study of Dr Johnson and His Friends (1946) was chosen as a book of the month by the Right Book Club in 1948.[3]
Apart from his more serious work as a biographer, historian and archaeologist, Vulliamy also wrote detective fiction.[4] His novel Don Among the Dead Men (1952) was filmed as A Jolly Bad Fellow, a black comedy starring Leo McKern.[5]
Vulliamy married Eileen Muriel Hynes (1886–1943), and they had two children, Patricia Drift Vulliamy (1917–1987), and John Sebastian Papendiek Vulliamy (1919–2007), an architect who was the father of the journalist Ed Vulliamy.