When I started out in publishing, nearly forty years ago, the book trade was more elderly than it is today. ‘Billy’ Collins and ‘Jamie’ Hamilton were in their late sixties; ‘Fred’ Warburg and Victor Gollancz were even older, and Sir Stanley Unwin, with his white goatee beard, looked as old as the hills. Longevity has become less prized in the intervening years. George Weidenfeld is still active in his eighties, and Ernest Hecht of the Souvenir Press is as effervescent as ever: but very few of my contemporaries have survived the course. Red-faced men in chalk-striped suits have been elbowed aside by high-powered lady publishers; long, boozy lunches at the Garrick are tolerated, just, for the few survivors of the ancien régime.

Literary Review

Jul 2006

Categories

Jeremy Lewis

Saint Victor

Case History of a Literary Groupie

Those Inky Scoundrels

A Worthy Enthusiasm

The Emigrés

A-Changin’ Times

Judging by the Cover

Hiding in Plain Sight

Gubbins’s Guerillas

England, My England

Plumped Pages

Homeland Insecurity

Glittering Entries

An Affair to Misremember

Press Gangs and Pensioners

Well Met By Moonlight

Angry Young Thing

Queen of the Slush Pile

The Clownish Poet

The Invisible Man

Any Advance?

Hats off to Harold

The Hills Are Alive

‘A Huge Hungry Dog’

‘The Uncelebrated Hardware of Our Language’