Allen Lane, the man who founded Penguin Books and made of it a national institution, rarely talked about himself, but when he did it was to the point: ‘I have got a little barrier around myself that I find very difficult to let anyone inside.’ And all who knew him, including even his loving daughters, continue to confirm this unapproachability. He was friendly and even jovial (particularly when drinking, which he much enjoyed), but intimacy … Did it repel him? Or frighten him? No one knew. And a strength of Jeremy Lewis’s marvellous book is that he doesn’t insult his reserved subject by trying to guess.

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