Early Life and Family
Born in London in 1947, Cockburn grew up in County Cork, Ireland. His father was socialist author and journalist Claud Cockburn. His mother, Patricia Evangeline Anne (née Arbuthnot), was the granddaughter of British colonial administrator Henry Arthur Blake and British politician George Arbuthnot; she had written an autobiography, Figure of Eight. Cockburn was educated at Glenalmond College, Perthshire, and Worcester College, University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire.
Cockburn has two brothers, Alexander Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, who are also journalists, and two half-sisters. One sister, Sarah, was best known as the mystery writer Sarah Caudwell. The other sister, Claudia, worked on disability and married Michael Flanders, half of the well-known performance double-act: Flanders and Swann; the two children of this marriage are the journalists Laura Flanders and Stephanie Flanders, his half-nieces.
He married Leslie Corkhill Redlich in San Francisco in 1977 and together they have three children, Chloe Frances Cockburn (April 3, 1979), The O.C. and House M.D. actress Olivia Wilde (née Olivia Jane Cockburn) and Charles Philip Cockburn (January 31, 1993). The Cockburns are distantly "related by cousinly marriages" to Sir George Cockburn, 10th Baronet, who ordered the Burning of Washington in 1814.
Read more about this topic: Andrew Cockburn
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or family:
“Probably more than youngsters at any age, early adolescents expect the adults they care about to demonstrate the virtues they want demonstrated. They also tend to expect adults they admire to be absolutely perfect. When adults disappoint them, they can be critical and intolerant.”
—The Lions Clubs International and the Quest Nation. The Surprising Years, I, ch.4 (1985)
“Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“Family lore can be a bore, but only when you are hearing it, never when you are relating it to the ones who will be carrying it on for you. A family without a storyteller or two has no way to make sense out of their past and no way to get a sense of themselves.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)