In his third volume of glorious memoirs, Jeremy Lewis brings his account of the world and manners of British publishing up to date. Standing at six feet and two inches, Lewis has closely observed a collection of eccentrics, whiz kids, swindlers, monsters, failed geniuses and lunatics for decades. Some were brilliant, others not. With the skill we have come to expect from the biographer of Connolly, Smollett and Allen Lane, Lewis turns his attention to a new gallery of these bookish creatures. Anyone who wants to know the feel and the smell of the late twentieth-century world of London publishing will delight in Lewis’s book. Its tone is without a trace of pomposity. 

One has come to expect the world of Jeremy Lewis to be filled with humanity, laughter and warmth, but also with a sense of melancholy, and the elegiac tempers this volume. For a start, the old literary world has almost disappeared. Its leading players, known and identifiable in the old