Harold Evans, Tina Brown Close Book On Quogue

Some readers may have noticed that the cover review in this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review was penned by Harold Evans, the former newspaper and book publishing executive. He may have composed the review right before movers took away the computer and various furnishings belonging to him and his wife, the editor Tina Brown, who have just sold their home in Quogue.

The couple owned the property on a 2.9-acre lot on Dune Road from 1984 through June 2016. The house required some rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy, and was not inhabitable again until 2014.

The 6,000-square-foot oceanfront, Cape Cod-style manse has just four bedrooms and two baths, a fireplace and other amenities—and of course a pool for those days when the Atlantic feels a tad nippy. The purchaser is 160 DQ LLC, a corporation formed in April in Delaware and represented by Allstate Corporate Services Corp. The selling price was nearly $8.6 million.

The British-born Mr. Evans, who is now 88 and an editor at large at Reuters, served in the Royal Air Force and then became a newspaper reporter. He eventually rose through the ranks to become the editor of The Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981. It was during his tenure there, in 1973, that he was introduced to the much-younger Tina Brown, a freelance journalist. In 1981, three years after Mr. Evans and his wife divorced, he and Ms. Brown were married. The ceremony was performed at Grey Gardens in East Hampton, the former Beale estate then owned by Ben Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, and his much-younger journalist wife, Sally Quinn.

Mr. Evans and Ms. Brown moved to the United States in 1984. He became editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Monthly Press, editorial director of U.S. News and World Report, a founding editor at Conde Nast Traveler, and president and publisher of the book house Random House, among other positions in New York City publishing. Mr. Evans left the industry in 2000, two years after the success of his book “The American Century.” Meanwhile, he and Ms. Brown had two children. She also held prominent positions in print publishing, most notably as editor of Vanity Fair and then The New Yorker. She was a founder, in 2008, with Barry Diller of the Daily Beast, which five years later merged with the remnants of Newsweek magazine. She now operates a company called Tina Brown Media.

Ms. Brown reportedly has been working on a memoir titled “Media Beast,” and it is not known how much of it was completed before the moving van arrived in Quogue.