Alan Pryce-Jones, a London-born book critic, author and journalist who was editor of The Times Literary Supplement, the prestigious British weekly, for a decade, died on Jan. 22 in Galveston, Tex. He was 91 and lived in Newport, R.I.

Mr. Pryce-Jones was viewed in the literary world with a mixture of respect and good humor, the latter sometimes bordering on ribbing. He was not only an eminent man of letters but also a very social being, fond of tarrying with old friends and making new ones, some with exalted status. In 1953 an article in The New York Times Magazine called him one of the articulate writers whose company Princess Margaret enjoyed.

In a 1972 essay Mr. Pryce-Jones wrote: ''Things might have been very different for me were I not a natural enjoyer. In this I am unlike most of my contemporaries who have made a name for themselves.''

Mr. Pryce-Jones was well known in the United States as well as Britain. Though he remained a British subject, he moved to New York in 1960 and later to Newport. In addition to his tenure at The Times Literary Supplement, where he was editor from 1948 to 1959, he was a book critic for The New York Herald Tribune, The World Journal Tribune and Newsday and a theater critic for Theater Arts. He also wrote reviews and essays for The New York Times Book Review.

Mr. Pryce-Jones, whose autobiography, ''The Bonus of Laughter,'' was published in 1987, knew most of the leading literary figures of his day. He once wrote wryly, ''I have attained, if any standing, that of a patriarch to whom strangers write asking if I have letters from E. Waugh or if I have ever met the Sitwells.''

His parents were Col. Henry Pryce-Jones, a highly placed British Army staff officer in World War I, and the former Vere Dawnay, granddaughter of a viscount.

Mr. Pryce-Jones graduated from Eton, where one of his teachers wrote, ''Keeping Pryce-Jones up to the mark is like breaking a butterfly on the wheel.'' After attending Oxford he was an assistant editor of The London Mercury, another literary publication, from 1928 to 1932.

In the 1930's he also wrote several books. His travel book about the Middle East, ''The Spring Journey'' (1931), won praise from critics. Some other works fared less well.

During World War II he was in British Army intelligence and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

He married Therese Fould-Springer, daughter of Baron Eugene Fould-Springer, in 1934. She died in 1953. He married Mary Jean Kempner Thorne in 1968. She died in 1969.

He is survived by a son, David Pryce-Jones of London and a stepson, Daniel K. Thorne of Galveston, Tex.